These are good questions and I look forward to seeing the community's answers. I'm still very new to the whole miles craze thing and think you're asking good questions to help newbies like us. So far I've only gotten two of the Citi/AA 75k cards, and I'd love to dive in head first, I'm just wary of the effects on my credit because, as has been repeated many times on this forum and elsewhere, your credit is one of your most valuable assets. I'm just not sure how all these applications and potential churns will affect my score, and even though I'm not planning to buy a house for 5+ years, I'm still hesitant to jump in before I have a complete understanding. Obviously there is a way to do it or there wouldn't be a thriving community here, but it can be difficult to form a clear understanding of how it all works when you're drawing information from a thousand different sources.

All that said, Flyertalk is a fantastic community and I appreciate everyone's input. If it weren't for you guys, I wouldn't be on my way to an admittedly modest 150k AA miles.