I've been reading this site for the past few months and I know that there are many seasoned travellers here and I'm hoping someone can help a lowly noob sort a few things out

Goal: I'd like to plan a RTW trip for April/May/June of 2013, I'm thinking about traveling for 6-8 weeks total and would like to find award flights for the following in J:

Home airport: BWI but could travel from other nearby airports
BWI - SYD (1 week-ish in Australia)
SYD - BKK (1-2 weeks in SE Asia)
BKK - LHR (4 weeks Western Europe)
LHR - BWI

Travel dates are flexible, as are the departure and arrival cities, my only sticking point is I'd *like* the flights to be long-haul and non-stop if possible. This is primarily because the descent always makes my head feel like it's about to explode and it's usually a good 24 hrs before I can hear normally again so I'd like to limit the number of descents if I can. And if I can't, well, beggars can't be choosers I guess.

I plan on using rail/bus/possibly RJ once I get to a general area (SE Asia, Western Europe) to travel around further.

From reading this forum it seems like a RTW ticket would be the most cost efficient way to make this trip happen but I'm running into a few problems...


1) How do I know how many miles a RTW OneWorld (or is it just AA?) award would cost? I did some searching but haven't found anything that looks official so at the moment I'm estimating 280-300K miles for J. Would this change depending on time of year?

2) I signed up for 2 Citi AA cards 6 months ago and have approx 170K miles right now. I did 1 personal and 1 business card so I don't believe I can get approved for the 2nd 75K personal at this point. Assuming I need 280K miles I would need to acquire 110K more miles in the next 8 months, are there any other programs that transfer into AA miles without being really devalued?

Other miles/points I have now:
CO - 50K
AMEX MR - 76K
UA - 13K

3) If I can't manage to get my AAdvantage account up to 280K would it make sense at all to try and book one-way award flights since I could transfer the AMEX MR points to some other program and possibly use the CO miles as well? Book a flight or two with AA and one with BA for instance?

From the searching I've done on the FF sites so far the one-way awards look ridiculously expensive. I know I've seen many threads where folks find low-mileage-cost flights so it seems to me I might be doing something wrong in my searching.