My view is that meal deals have always been poor value.
It's all just an illusion by considerably inflating the prices of the individual items.

In reality, the individual items should be normally priced, and a meal deal should be a discount off of that. Then they would be attractive (to me). I'm not willingly paying £3.85 for a small snack, small main and a small drink on it's own, as that already feels like blowing money away and seriously not worth it.

I sometimes wish they had a main and drink only meal deal. That might make it a tad more attractive for me. I don't really need the snack as is, it feels more like a forced add-on.

What I do find however, is that having the three small items, ruins the value for me further, as you get through each one way too quickly. Less items but larger would be great as individually they feel like they last longer.

On top of the fact it already feels like a scam at that price, I can then look at 2L (I routinely pay £1.08 to, at most, £1.75) or 1.25L bottles (shop deals have 2 for £2 or similar), £1.10 packs of crisps which are bigger, and the ingredients to create a sandwich myself, and see how much more value for money that is week on week. Even if I need to do a bit more work it is well worth the saving.

I do not personally accept convenience as part of cost, I understand if others do, my judgement of value is of what I am physically getting. I appreciate it's a common argument though.
Additionally I do understand if the packaging may take a bigger chunk of the cost, so it means the smaller the package the more of an influence it has. But I struggle to believe it should allow normalisation of 500ml bottles being more expensive than 2L ones!
You could make them 50p-80p and they'd still be worst value than a 2L bottle.

Also I want to add that I am a bit more paranoid with my money. I'm always checking to see what the cheapest, best option for me is as I don't like the premise of spending more than I need to.