Any specifics that would help to remove those huge charges from xONEx tickets (or any other) would be greatly appreciated. There's a secret society operating in another forum dedicated to finding routings that'll make those charges magically disappear, but they purposely speak in tongues lest the airlines catch on and fix their loopholes. If you're willing to share any of their secrets openly or by PM, I'm all (electronic) ears.

The only 'exploit' I'm aware of is that the carrier that issues the xONEx ticket appears to be free to apply their own surcharge rules to the entire thing - a weird bit of book-keeping if I ever saw one - so people used to prefer to use AA because they were still not playing the YQ/YR game. That's changed somewhat since they've officially partnered with BA/IB.