Well, yes I agree with you that in theory if you live with the aim to achieve gold as easily as possible and live in Germany, you could head off to the US just to take those AA F trips for status. However, I was thinking of 'normal' (no value judgement intended) flyers (in my opinion the vast majority, and indeed my own case - I would never do a pure MR on flights I wouldn't need) who fly the flights they actually need to take. In this framework, the vast majority of EU based members including gold (be they British, French, German or anything else) never end up flying a domestic US route most years or if they do may take one or two. By contrast, many US based members will fly more domestic US routes than any other types of flights or indeed, in many cases, used to only fly domestic US routes (hence BA introducing the 4 BA metal flight requirement some years ago). So while a status-greedy continental European or one of the few members who fly a lot of domestic US segments could use US routings to qualify easily, I do think that in real and practical terms, the average US gold customer qualifies much more easily than the average German customer.