I have basically stopped flying AA on award tickets due to cutbacks at my local airport (we are down to 3 daily ERJs to ORD which usually have almost no award seats available), so I currently value my (several 100K) AA miles at virtually nothing (as in, whenever I want to book a trip, it makes sense to go via ORD, and an AA award is available, then I book without regard to price). Otherwise I'd never use them up.

When AA was a more serious option, they were worth between 1c and 1.5c to me (I use coach awards only, and stay at cheap hotels using Priceline so have no interest in the value my miles would have when transferred to hotel programs, and just don't get the point of spending double or more on awards. I wouldn't pay more than $100 for a TATL upgrade, so why would I pay several times that value in miles? Nowadays I will buy the premium class awards, but only because I have no way of using up my miles any time soon through Y awards only.)

I value the miles of other carriers with more frequent service to my home airport much more than AA miles (ie 1.0c-1.5cpm, rather than close to zero).

Summary: YMMV, big time. But I think my current strategy (use the miles whenver you can, because for my travel patterns, they're not worth much) is more typical of 99% of the population than the huge value for intercontinental premium travel that some people put on them on FT.