I appreciate OP's post.
It's true that US as Preferred is an "unfair" comparison with UA as Dirt.
But, for me and many others on this board, that's our choice at present, since UA (unlike US with Trial Preferred) does not make it easy to get out of the dirt. I sometimes ask myself shouldn't I be pricing other carriers, looking at different flight times, and so on.... Without having the OP experience, I still conclude "no," for precisely the reason in the OP: even though things can (and sometimes do) go wrong on US, having some status reduces the anxiety of either anticipation of problems or the problems themselves.