I have read the latest rules for fares originating out of Australia, yet I find no mention of things like stopovers(except that only 2 stopovers are permitted in continent of origin), # of transits of a city, etc.
Which makes me ask: is there an underlying
base set of rules in addition to the rules for each country.

In particular, would anyone care to comment on
1)stopovers - are these now in fact limited only by the number of sectors? So that if you had a continent that allowed 4 sectors, you could have 5 stopovers?
2)transits - is there some rule that limits the number of transits of a city to two?
3)backtracking - my understanding of backtracking is that it applies only to intercontinental travel and not intracontinental travel, except for specific rules like 1 cross continental flight in North America.
4)why my travel agent says QF is objecting to the following routing on a 6 continent OW RTW originating in Australia, siting problems with backtracking and excessive transits of Miami in the North American part:

PER-AKL
AKL-EZE
EZE-SCL
SCL-LIM-CUZ
surface
LPB-MIA-JFK
JFK-MIA-SJO
surface
PTY-MIA-LHR
...
5) If I changed the routing above to
LPB-MIA-JFK (stopover)
JFK-MIA-SJO (stopover)
SJO-DFW-MEX-MAD
...
could anyone find fault with this?