A bit of sleep has made this look better
Having taken a step back and given this some thought I am not so upset over the changes.
It is getting a bit silly that there are more people in the priority boarding line than normal economy!
This year I hit Elite by June without really breaking much of a sweat and would have got there sooner if my trip back to the uk for my passport renewal had been AC rather than TS! Total for the year on *A 48k.
Based on planned flying and a very attractive promo from BA I knew I could not make SE, so I switched to BA and got EC silver plus enough points for 2 First roundtrip flights from canada to london and that status is valid till end of Nov 2013
For the average short haul <1000 miles these new changes are going to hurt really badly and a lot of my flying is this nature but again I have a number of long hauls each year that will help my mileage.
Basically this is forces me to fly *A rather than spread my miles over multiple alliances.