Thank you hyfly for your investigative effort on this issue on my behalf. I am still not comfortable, however, that I have all the best answers that are typical of a normal in depth FlyerTalk discussion. Iter-Europe travel is a great source of confusion to me.

Because my most logical choice would be to find a cheap UA ticket to somewhere in Europe where there is a logical and cost-effective connection to MPL, it would perhaps have made a great deal more sense (in retrospect) to have made my original post in United Forum. I chose FT Miles Buzz instead because I thought it would garner more responses from the very sophisticated Inter-European travelers in that space, as proved to be the case.

Now I am just baffled.