I think much of this could be addressed if OW carriers allowed searching through partner award inventory on their website. For example, AA is pretty good at searching for paid fares, but you cannot search for any award on a partner via aa.com - even if it's an AA codeshare. Even for AA it's iffy, as I've found inventory by calling that wasn't visible on the website (some of that is expanded availability to EXPs, but I saw this even before becoming EXP).

However, I will gladly keep the current system, convoluted as it is, than exchange my cache of AAdvantage miles for SkyPesos. I'd like to stick with AA redemption rates and partner F awards.

But I do agree, YQ is super mean.