To me, the "direct flight" and its consequences is one of the most annoying Delta policies that could easily be fixed.

It's probably not worth the hassle but I have had success getting a change fee waived because I told them I did not want to lose out on the segment.

Someone should tell Delta that once you start using 4 digit flight numbers, there are 9999 possibilities.

They could also make us happy if they used the same flight number for hub-spoke-hub routings instead of spoke-hub-spoke.