Disclaimer up front: Not trying to be an AApologist, just giving my experience. Most US flagged carriers will give you similar results.

Anyway, This sounds like the struggle I had a little over a year ago.

I had two trips from Europe to CAE in DEC 08 and thought I would fly maybe 3 more TATLs in 2009. One to SAT, one to CAE and a wildcard. The SAT trip would be on AA and who knew about the wildcard.

I wanted to maximize my experience.

The convenient thing to do would have been fly my DEC 08 trips on US FRA-CLT or DL FRA-ATL, but as I read through this board I realized that a long term vision is often the best. Since I knew at least 1 09 TATL would be on AA, I decided they would all be with AA. So all of my flights to the southeast of the US wound up going FRA-DFW-XXX.

That gave me miles, upgrades, lounges, bonus miles. I wound up flying much more than I ever thought I would and also did a MR and went from having 30K miles in my account to 275,000.

The point is I went a little out of my way and I had a much better travel experience and am now looking forward to flying RTW with my DW in J on an award ticket, something I never had even heard about before FT. A bit of inconvenience has helped me out alot.

Take a look at what domestic *A and OW carriers can do for you and who cares if you have to fly a couple of hours out of the way. When doing a TATL your day is pretty much shot anyway, might as well get something out of it!