But this is the way it's always worked.

Amtrak's program rules used to tell you, wrongly, that reward travel would reset the 3-year clock. But, it was confirmed by AGR representatives, as well as AGR members, that the Terms/Conditions were incorrect: reward travel actually never did reset the 3-year expiration.

AGR has simply modified the rules to reflect how the program actually works (yes, that's kind of backwards, but at least things are more clear now.)