Quite right -- I've just booked a pair of OW130C awards for my wife and I. The actual flight routing (all in J) looks like this:

SJC-HNL (AA)
HNL-SYD-MEL-PER-HKG (QF)
HKG-NRT (CX)
NRT-SJC (AA)

...for a total of 20,332 miles.

But the billable routing is:

SJC-MEL-PER-NRT-SJC

...for a total of 19,622 miles. Hence, OW130C awards.

This was a useful discovery which I only later found in the FT archives -- 24-hour or less connections don't count as stopovers so your flight mileage is only calculated between the starting and ending points. So I treat SJC-MEL as one "segment" even though I'm stopping in HNL and SYD along the way.

And yes, I tried for the directs out of LAX but QF had nothing available any time in the latter half of December.

twj