This is all becoming so silly. Here are my predictions:
A *very* few people got lucky and did get flights for free. (4 miles, plus taxes which go to a government, plus a few fees is, for my purposes in this message, "free").
Absent some unusual circumstances (I am not a participant in the Google group and I don't know what strategies they might have) NO ONE ELSE is flying First Class for free on this offer.
The DOT will eventually: a) do nothing; or, b) levy a fine against UAL for a combination of IT stupidity, customer inconvenience and administrative costs at the DOT to deal with the mess. The amount of the fine will not be enough to cause UAL to offer free flights instead and it will not even be enough to cause UAL to make a major change to their IT infrastructure. The DOT regulation might be changed or it might not. But there is no "civil" right to enforce the DOT regulation - it is administrative and only the DOT can decide what to do.
The arguments about "I thought it was a sale" are offensive. No one who knows how to use a computer is that stupid. And if someone really did believe that, the reliance was not "reasonable," so it still wouldn't matter.
I don't know what will happen with the small claims suits, because I don't know whether UAL will decide to actually send employees to oppose or just pay off the ones that go badly (or perhaps appeal only those which go badly, if allowed in the individual jurisdiction).
P.S:
I VERY MUCH want to know what really happend at UAL. Was this a hack? Unlike the RGN incident, where there was a currency conversion issue (which I can logically follow), I don't understand what "error" lead to this particular problem. And, in case anyone doesn't understand, I am not saying that UAL handled this well. I know that their PR people wrote things that were ultimately wrong, I know what their letters were unclear/inaccurate, etc. But that doesn't change my conclusions.