I really appreciated reading what the OP's perspective. For a long time I have been thinking the very same thing. The oldschool bloggers who have been blogging for the past 5-10 years are who I have been following. These brand new bloggers who are repeating verbatim from flyertalk are the ones who are ruining things for us. SO many things have changed for the worse in terms of deals: AAdvantage is no longer churnable, Chase is blacklisting people right and left, AMEX stopped matching bonus's etc (and the list goes on and on) My guess is that things will continue to go downward due to the 100's of bloggers.


Funny Story:
I was corresponding with one of these small time bloggers (I think the blog is less than a year old) and suddenly he wrote "I hope you are using my links! i'm glad to help you, but if your not using my links please let me know"
PS:
I knew MUCH more than him and ended up teaching him a few tricks of the trade