Not that I know of, but think about the logistics here. There are many SFO-LAX flights per day; there is only one SFO-SYD and only one LAX-SYD. If they were going to miss SFO-SYD, they would have been stuck overnight; you would have been (and were) stuck for hopefully only an hour or so. There were also 4 of them and only one of you. For that reason, I would imagine they would have taken precedence out of sheer pragmatism, even if not policy.

As much as it would suck, I personally would be OK with losing even a few hours of my time in order to ensure that 4 others didn't have to lose an entire day. I suspect UA made the same call.

You should expect no compensation; this is nothing similar to IDB. You were going standby, something which is by definition not guaranteed. You ended up flying on your originally-ticketed flight, so you technically lost nothing (yes, I know you ended up missing your connection due to weather delays, but had you not gone standby or had standby not been available, that would have been your outcome anyway). You failed to clear standby, but since there was no guarantee of clearance, you didn't lose anything to which you were entitled. Since SEA-SFO was delayed due to weather, UA isn't at fault there, either.

It sucks that you missed your standby and then missed your connection, but this was not an IDB (nor similar), and you should expect no compensation.