Regarding your wife's trip next year, one key thing is to start planning very early if you want to use miles for tickets or upgrades. I'm not sure about Lufthansa, but for most airlines you can start checking availability around 11 months out (more exactly, I think it's 331 days or something). Most airlines have very few "free" tickets or upgrades available that you can actually book in advance, so you need to start looking right at the 11 month window for availability. This is especially true for business or first class, less so for coach.

Also, when using miles to purchase "free" tickets, keep an eye on the hidden extras (taxes and fees) that you have to pay. These vary wildly: United's are not too horrible, but other airlines (notably Virgin Atlantic) can charge $600+ per coach ticket for these "free" tickets booked with miles.

And finally, you mentioned using CC points to buy a ticket. Some non-airline CC programs give you one "point" per $100 spent, which you can use to buy "any ticket, any time". The problem with this is that the tickets you buy this way may cost you more in effect than if you used an airline credit card to "purchase" them. For example, if a ticket in coach to Europe costs $800, you will have to spend $80000 on your card to get enough points. If you instead use an airline card that gives you 3X miles per dollar, and a coach ticket on United costs 55,000 miles (assuming a Saver reward), you would "only" have to spend $18,300 to get this ticket (excluding taxes and fees). The example become much more extreme if you want to travel in business class (which, trust me, you will!), where to purchase tickets cost about $3000 minimum.