Well,you're virtually the lone wolf among most people posting in this thread as they've come to complain about the changes. Most people do just as you're doing since they don't know about the MM program. Clearly they're not using the cards for the MM benefits. The suppositions that AA will see substantially reduced use of the cards due to this is very unlikely.
Cheers.
My use of AA Cards is what got me to MM status faster. My guess is 400K BIS; 400K promotions etc, and 200K by using the cards. As a result I made MM on AA last year but am sitting at 950K on UA and 925K on DL. Now with the opportunity for LT PLT pretty much gone....my use of cards will be solely which program I want to accumulate mies in.