Firstly, I believe that I have more perspective than you could possibly imagine, yes I am DM/2MM on DL and Platinum for life on AFKL, oh but then again I am a long time LH Senator AS WELL AS a TK E+, oh yeah, there is the BA Gold that I have held consecutively for the last 14 years straight and my EK Gold Status (oh yeah my EY status as well that I am letting slide). I am hostage to no airline nor alliance and fly each as they are advantageous for me and me alone. I have flown all St airlines save TAROM, all Oneworld airlinmes save LAN and all the serious airlines in Star Alliance (I am not including Tyrolean air and junk like that), Segments? Without going into too many boring details, lets just say that I have over 1000 segments across the ST airlines, probably 800 across the * airlines and another similar number across the 1W airlines, I really do know what I am talking about, and just as in the real World I have noticed that no serious real world FF gives any credence to Skytrax 'stars" they are usually quoted by the same sort of people that brag that they only stay in Schrager hotels, or use Quintessentially............

Also I have flown Hainan Airlines and while not Air Koryo, are not up there, and in my opinion neither is Qatar either

Now continuing with reality, I love CX, I really do, and when I am flying to/fr/through HKG I try to fly them, however other than that with one or two fifth freedom exceptions that they have they are just not convenient, nor are they a particularly large carrier, All of China's major carriers are exponentially bigger and 2 out of three of them are ST members (China Southern, China Eastern AND Shanghai Airlines AND China Airlines - Taiwan soon,) Then there is Korean and the fact that DL is the third largest airline in Japan with fifth freedom routes that cannot be duplicated by anyone.......oh yeah, and Vietnam Airlines which you harped on about. You have Garuda AND an Indian carrier coming in as well.

The Middle East? Here is a secret for you...........The action is in the Gulf, and the Gulf carriers do not want to join alliances, so everyone gets the flotsam, so who cares??

Australia and NZ? I always love these statements on FT. Australia/NZ is a tiny market 20 odd million people at the end of the World. There are two options QF and NZ, they are accounted for, You can get there using ST airlines, that is enough. Quite honestly whenever I see people moaning about this it is not, 'Gee I wish XX flew there more becuase I do business there and want to fly there 10 times a year" but rather, "I wish they flew there so I could use my miles!!"

BTW SV may be dodgy, 15 years ago so was TK, now look at what they have become (and ST actually turned TK down before the application stage a long time ago, TK is now bigger than BA and in many respects better, BTW I suppose you know no Turkish people as TK does NOT call itself a Middle Eastern carrier, nor do Turks consider their country to be the Middle East). At the end of the day it is like those who used to harp on about Aeroflot in Skyteam, forgetting the fact that it is now a pretty decent carrier (at least on its intl flights) but the fcat is that it benefitted those who had to fly to Russia and maybe helped a few out with routings that they would otherwise not have had available, it gave options..........That is what SV will bring to the table. And I do have to say that ST membership has done more t o straighten out developing airlines in the last 10 years than any other alliance has done (Korean, Aeroflot, CSA and Vietnam Airlines all come to mind).