Don't give up yet. There still may be some interesting possibilities in the winter, especially if you don't mind a bit of suspense in terms of how your trip will eventually work out. During irregular ops (in this case, optimized by flying when the weather can be dicey), you end up re-booked and those re-books often put you into Y at 1.5x EQM/EQS. It can be a bit scary leaving your mileage run to the last month of the year, but it's also exciting, and there's something liberating about putting yourself in the hands of gate agents to help you out. Strangely enough, they often seem more than willing to help you with your project. My first and only true mileage run fell apart at the end of the first of five segments on day 1. I'm in Santa Barbara (SBA), it's dumping outside so bad you can't even see the planes on the runway, I've got 4 more segments to get to IAD. I go up to the GA and she's already got me on the screen. Two screens, actually. She had been looking at my itin, trying to figure out what to do with me. Bless her soul, she figured out how to get me to IAD by dropping one segment but almost no miles.

I didn't know about the ita tool at the time; I constructed my itin by looking at the deals UA was offering on various flights and sorta pieced them together. $308 SFO-IAD-SFO with 8 segments in the end, about 8k miles x2 (DEQM). And the most fun I've ever had flying.