I read the web posting. It's really a perfect storm situation: OP's friend ("OPF") has two planes to OZ go mx and gets UA's usual non-elite CS run-around...which would have been bad enough except that the tight time-frame of his mother's funeral gets thrown into the mix. Oy. That's about as bad as it gets.
Putting aside for the moment the lack of sympathay from UA I believe the OPF experienced, it's hard to know from the web posting what UA was supposed to have done. Looking at the schedules, there is only one flight that could have gotten OPF into SYD earlier than the UA flight (VA), but only by an hour, though it is true that there were a numer of non-UA flight options that could have gotten him into MEL a coulpe of hours early. The problem is that at the time OPF wanted these changes, the second flight hadn't yet gone mx. So basically OP was looking for UA to endorse his ticket to VA in order to buy him in a couple of hours over the rebooked UA flight, not to make the viewing, which he had already missed, and not to make the funeral, which he had not yet missed, but to get there a bit earlier. Tough call. I see why he would want this, and I see why in a perfect world UA (or any carrier for that matter) would accommodate, but in the context of rebooking a 747's worth of disgruntled pax, I can see how this might fall through the cracks. Obviously everything then went FUBAR when the second flight went mx.
I'm not trying to apologize for UA's at times terrible customer service for MPs, but let's see this for what it is: a double mx and UA's usual bad CS that just happened to happen for the OPF at the absolute worst possible time for him personally. I'm not sure how that makes this episode "A Case Study" in UA's "Greed", but then again if I were in the OPF's shoes, I'd have lost my marbles as well.