Well, silly me ....
I have an AMEX Optima card, which I've had for years and seldom use. A couple of years ago, a rep convinced me to join Membership Rewards. For one thing, he said, it's free. So I did.
I managed to accumulate just a shade over 1000 points, and this looked like a good opportunity to get 6000 BA miles. so I charged ahead.
This is when I found out there are two Membership rewards programs; Membership Rewards, and Membership Rewards Express. The second one is free, but the first one costs 40 bucks a year. Naturally. I have the Express version. That version does not allow transfers to FF programs.
In all the years I've been around FT, I'm astonished that I was unaware of the two different programs.