We love having a Starwood AMEX card, along with several UA cards, an AA card, several AS cards (mostly to get the $50 companion certs every year), and a NWA card. We want to have all of our bases covered in our FL-IRA, when we retire.
We were able to trade 120,000 Starwood points last December, for 300,000 Qantas miles (thank you
OzStamps, which we in turn used for two free Concorde tickets.

Awesome!!
Without FlyerTalk, I would never even have dreamed of traveling at the level of luxury-on-a-budget that we now enjoy.