This is all well and good until you realize that first class on an airplane is priced and marketed as a Veblen good.

Yes, you get caviar, Johnnie Walker Blue, Bordeaux and fancy menu items. Which are all provided at a pretty large multiple of what you'd pay for the same items at sea level (and arguably taste better there too, since we lose ability to taste food at high altitude and low humidity, otherwise known as an airplane), and are mostly there to signal to you "hey, you're in :-:FIRST CLASS!!!!:-:"

A lot of people in the world don't have the ability or inclination to buy Veblen goods. They don't buy Bugatti Veyrons or SQ Suites tickets. In fact, there's a decent amount of research that indicates that millionaires do NOT go for Veblen goods- it's often people who spend as much as they make who get into the "I must have the fancy car and the first class tickets" status symbol trap that prevents them from accumulating wealth.

And that, simply put, is why some people in this community and in the blogger world think that 3000 AMEX points and $2.50 USD that turn into a $500 coach fare is actually a good deal- because they wouldn't dream of ever shelling out $10,000 or more for :-:FIRST CLASS!!!!:-: when they could pay a child's private school tuition for a year with that money, but they have to pay $500 for plane tickets all the time.

As for a Lufthansa F redemption, yes it sounds good in theory, but it has so many limitations that to put a blanket statement on all Lufthansa/Swiss redemptions is misleading at best.

First off, given that Lufthansa group airlines don't generally have availability until close in (two weeks or less), you're talking about leaving a lot to chance (especially since M&M people may be waitlisting for award seats ahead of the Australians who bought a metric tonne of US miles). A lot of us aren't twenty-something aspirational travel porn bloggers/travel consultants who can simply pick up and leave on short notice to go to Singapore for the weekend. Vacations have to be planned for a lot of people with job/family/life commitments, and leaving the exact flights we're taking to less than two weeks in may mean fees for flight changes (assuming we did something like book CA/TG F or LH C waiting for LH F to open up), wasting time on the phone with people who can't seem to give you a consistent answer on what bookings are allowed, and having to take suboptimal routings that make us waste time in very nice rooms in airports (not all of us want to take pictures of the lounges we went to so we can humblebrag about how we were forced to connect through MUC, FRA and ZRH to fly to Asia in first class, and take circuitous routings- some of us want to actually get to where it is we're going).

See? Anyone can play this game.

Anyways, to stumble back towards the thread topic... no, I don't think posting or reading a message board makes you more entitled to a deal than reading a blog (but if you want to go hide and share secrets with only your best buddies, oh well, your call, can't say I blame you). And yes, bloggers are killing deals, and many are obviously self interested in generating cash and link referral revenue. My solution is to use Safari in reader mode and not click the links- plus read the bloggers who are genuinely informative about the industry and travel as well as entertaining, and not just dealing out a mish-mosh of aspirational travel porn and credit card links, plus regurgitated FT posts.

Of course, given that 30 years ago many less miles bought you much more in the way of travel, but no amount of miles back then could have gotten you IFE and the comfort you get in lowly business class now, I don't see the point of whining about the "good old days"- if anything luxury travel is far more accessible now than it was back then. To paraphrase something Auntie Mame might say, we're at a banquet and people would rather complain and starve than dig in. No, we won't see Chateaubriand on JFK-DEN flights again, and the Discover America deal isn't as much fun as it used to be. But things are still pretty good, even if those cursed bloggers are killing deals, and there's an industry of travel consultants competing with me for limited first class redemptions...