Last year, due in large part to a job that involved a fair amount of travel to South America and Europe, I achieved airline status for the first time - E on Aeroplan. It was nice - the lounge access and early boarding were positive developments, and I even got lucky and was able to upgrade a couple of times on long-haul flights. Hell, even bumping myself up to business on an LGA-YYZ hop (which I've usually been able to do) was appreciated. With a fair number of long trips this year, I qualified as E 50K for 2013.

Also, I'm one of those people who actually finds AC to be a good airline, and I've never had a bad experience with it - even in Y. I'd rank it a league above anything that flies from the US.

Now, however, I'm not sure if I should continue trying to reach status with AE next year or perhaps switch to UA, or even AA/Oneworld. In the first place, it will become more difficult for me to reach 50K miles, as I've changed jobs and likely won't be traveling as much. However, even if I do, it looks like I'll never be able to upgrade on AC again because I don't buy the right fare classes. It appears that free/cheap flights on AC are a cruel joke due to the well-known scamcarges. I don't care enough about the lounges or the free luggage allowance to get too worked up about them.

Is there any reason to stay with AE as opposed to steering my travel toward another FF program, either in or outside of *A? And, for a traveler based in NYC with frequent travel to Canada but also Latin America and Europe, would UA or AA be preferable in terms of achieving upgrades?

At this point, I'm thinking AA might be the best bet given their links to LA and BA, although their route network to Canada, particularly from NYC, is sad. At least if I went with UA (an airline I really dislike) I could credit AC flights to it.

Anyone else facing a similar decision?