One more note is ANA will expire your unused mileage and they charge very high fuel surcharges. An example I can show you is if you use ANA Miles for a *A flight from LAX-FRA I often had to pay upwards of $250-300 in bogus charges. Booking the same flight using AC miles was about $70. Asking United for that same flight "no availability".
Dunno if this post helps or just confuses you more. ANA recently lowered the bogus fuel / airport charges but still they are higher in my experience then AC or even US on *A "fuel and airport" charges.
Don't get me wrong there are other advantages to using ANA. It only took
me 90k miles for YVR-HKG in business on AC whereas AC via Aeroplan wanted 120k or 115k (can't remember precisely) for the same flight.