Glad I'm able to help some. I've learned a lot from this group of people in the last 5 months that I've been paying attention.

A few other thoughts that have been on my mind since I wrote it:
1) It might be obvious but in case it isn't, a methodical approach is key here. If you find a good route search, record it so you can recreate it. I went too quickly a few times, changing too much, and lost track of a deal I found. That really forced me to develop a methodology rather than just trying random things. The best suggestion though: 1 change at a time. When you make 2 changes, you don't know which change was a good one and you're effectively just guessing.

2) I occasionally toss hubs into the mix, just to see what happens. Usually this is because I'm not finding an obvious good paths out of my origination or into my destination during my 2-3 level deep searches.

3) I believe there's a directive to specify the exact flight. That may be better than just tossing in the airport. On the plus side, it will eliminate a lot more possibilities the given segment, thus getting deeper into the extended route search. On the negative side though, I often find there are several fares of the same price to the initial connection or for the last connection and specifying the exact flight might be too restrictive. I haven't tried this refinement yet though so it could be good or bad.

4) I'm not sure of the exact phrasing re. stops vs. plane changes, but if you're maximizing MQS, be aware that a stop that stays on the same plane (flight number?) doesn't result in another segment (if I understand that correctly). When I did this recently, I just happened to notice that Delta's web site was reporting one fewer MQS than I expected and it was due to the stop vs. plane change. I might be using the wrong terms here.

5) It can be painfully time consuming.

Also, I struggled some with how to read the search line and realized that it may not be entirely intuitive. Take the following example:

msy :: ua ord ua den ua sfo ua
lax :: ua ua

You can read line 1 as:
MSY on UA to ORD on UA to DEN on UA to SFO on UA to LAX.
LAX is implied in line 1, given that this is a RT.

The 2nd line is a bit different because it's missing an airport. You can read that as:
LAX on UA to <somewhere> on UA to MSY
MSY is implied in line 2, given that this is a RT.

This link takes you to the ITA software route language screen which details much more about how to do it.
http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/di...dvanced-topics

I think 20 years of writing software helps me out here...

This was a nice distraction from a painful process of applying regression analysis to an economic paper. I wish my calculus and stats weren't so rusty. Oh well... Back to regressions and Bureau of Labor Statistics data.