Tired of all this being beaten to death, so I'm going to go off on you now.

I think it's you who needs to go back and re-read exactly what Delta "presented and promised" - and that's capacity-controlled upgrades. It's all right here: http://www.delta.com/skymiles/about_...s/index.jsp#tc . No matter how frequent a flyer you are, you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement if you think you should sit up front with your T fare on a competitive route just because you booked 6 days early, and seriously believe passengers paying many times more than you did should sit in the back. There's a reason it's called a Coach fare - you should expect to sit in Coach when you buy the ticket. If you expect otherwise, buy a ticket in F. If you don't want to, then you have no one but yourself to blame when your gamble goes wrong. The ones who drive me particularly nuts are the ones whose upgrade goes through at the gate but who complain anyway because it didn't happen 5 days out.

The elite upgrade program derives its value from likely (but not guaranteed) upgrades. And if Delta magically started being able to fill every F cabin with paying customers one day, and elite upgrades went to 0... do you think they'd miss the revenue from the disgruntled elites who used to get upgrades on their T fares? You're fooling yourself if you think your elite card alone makes you one of Delta's best customers. Those who pay to sit up front are Delta's best customers, not those who complain about when their upgrade did or didn't go through.