True, but "everyday purchases" end up representing a small fraction of my total spend. If I used the HH Amex for everything, my blended earning rate would probably be 3.2 or something.

Of course, I do carry both cards in my wallet, so there's no reason I couldn't do HH Amex for the right categories.

All of that said, the annual fee represents a tiny fraction of the overall value of the card in any given year. For HH, I'm moving up to Surpass in late '09 to begin using it as my primary card on Jan 1, 2010. Diamond status at HH is very much worthwhile.

My original point was that I generally get slightly more value out of 1 Starpoint than 3 (or 3.2...or even 3.5 or whatever) HHonors points. Don't get me wrong - I love HHonors points - it's just that I can get big returns out of very small SPG redemptions, whereas HH points are generally utilized in 175k+ chunks.