Not quite. Kindly read the rest of my post.

More like, it's a nice benefit for MPC (Cathay's "Marco Polo Club", their FF club) members to at least have some seats held back for either them or last-minute cash pax. What I'm proposing isn't exactly groundbreaking, BA does it in F (allocating certain preferred seats to their own members). It just doesn't strike me as completely fair that pax who book partner award seats 180 days out get the same inventory as someone from Cathay's own FF program (or last-minute cash pax). I'm not trying to be rude, it's just the way it is. If you were in Cathay's own program you'd probably have similar sentiments.

Cathay's F cabins don't seem to have seats held back, but in J on the 77W they do seem to sometimes not release 11A/K (which is what Iceman77_7 refers to, and what I'm talking about). Presumably it is for this reason (saved for MPCs). Nothing to do with "unwashed masses".