Here's what the new program accomplishes- there are a lot of 150k to 175k fliers who were putting 75k a year on DL to reach PM, and then booking everything else on a competing airline. Now a good number of those people will book 125k a year on DL (or 100k if they are smart and pingpong the system, as I described above), and book the rest of their revenue travel on competing airlines.

So, the program helps DL, but they're still leaving a huge amount of money on the table. They could have done much better for themselves.