Sorry, Dave, I take issue with folks who copy entire messages into their reply when the original is available to the reader with a simple scroll up the page. So I try to limit the amount I repeat to the minimum needed to establish the talking point. I wasn't looking for "credibility", merely repeating a point I thought had been clear enough the first time I made it.

As to each airline making up their own OW rules, I think that is specifically not allowed. Of course, if we can, some of us try to do "agent shopping" when we get an answer we don't like the first time. Perhaps AA or CX has a greater number of agents willing to bend rules in the customer's favor; my feeling is that they're simply better trained.

I'm not the least bit happy with Qantas, in spite of the several defenders who've reported great track records with them.
Quite likely I got unlucky and my pnr got assigned to an ill-trained agent - who described it as a "very difficult itinerary".

Good grief - it was a simple OWE 4-continent with two extra segments in SWP. Nothing the least bit controversial about it.

True enough, with a lot of segments there were a lot of airport taxes and fees to add up, but I hope that's a lookup table that doesn't require advanced calculus to figure. (If it's not in the computer and requires any manual processing at all, they're living in the dinosaur era.)

So the process of pricing a (non-seasonal) OWE should really boil down to checking that the route conforms to the rules (and there really are only a dozen rules), counting the number of continents visited, counting the number of segments on each and charging extra if allowed/necessary, and adding the taxes. That it's normally done in 24 hours doesn't surprise me; that mine took a month most certainly does.