Hi folks. Hoping for some help selecting a oneworld program. Currently a UA flyer but I'm relocating from SFOish to MELish, and *A seems to be fairly useless out of Melbourne (unless you really like going to Bangkok, Singapore and Auckland) so I'll probably be going for oneworld.

Right now I'm an AA platinum thanks to AA's overly-generous status-match offer from earlier but I haven't requalified for next year; not sure whether I'll be soft-landed to gold or not. I've been a QFF member long enough to have a six-digit membership number, but I've never managed to obtain any status and have a mere 575 lifetime status credits. I'd like to have some kind of oneworld sapphire status in the longer term.

Right now I fly ~50,000 miles a year, probably going to continue to do something similar but on a different continent. Let's say three longhaul return trips a year to the US and Europe, plus a bunch of domestic Australian flying, particularly MEL-SYD.

All my own travel is booked in cheapest-available economy, and while I don't know the details of my new employer's travel policy I think my work travel probably will be too . So I don't think Qantas Frequent Flyer is going to make any sense for me since status credit earning is seriously stingy for cheap fares.

AA seems like the obvious choice since it's a mile-based program, but as far as I can figure out from reading the rules it's pretty mysterious and opaque whether you earn miles or not on any given QF flight. Is there a best-practice for maximising your AA miles while flying on QF/CX/BA?

I'm not really familiar with any of the other oneworld programs, but is there one I should be looking at?

Other alternatives include (a) trying to figure out something weird involving flying DJ domestically and crediting to NZ/SQ/DL or (b) saying "bugger it", buying a Qantas Club membership to get most of the benefits of oneworld sapphire, and relaxing.