Personally, I enrolled online for free in BA and QF FF programs and used their award systems to find availability, always searching for individual segments, never connecting flights. I recently booked two OW190C flights (<35,000 miles in Business) with 16 segments and it took about 25 minutes. I had the dates, flight numbers and carriers and the AAgent just booked each segment as I called it out. The part that took the longest was calculating the taxes. Email confirmation came in <24 hours.