what you have failed to recognize is that by eliminating <60k flyers from being 'elite' you are really only eliminating this group as it currently exists from the benefits you refer to such as upgrades, you are not reducing the overall FF population in a meaningful way. if the upgrade process works as advertised, no flyer >60k miiles would realize any benefit from your new system, because the queue of people ahead of them would be the exact same length, it would just be stratifed differently. in other words, if this system was adopted and folks played by it with the same travel patterns they do in the current system, the only people whose upgrade frequency would change are the <60k flyers, going from low percentage upgrades to 0%. upgrade benefits for everyone else would be unchanged.

the only way to meaninfully thin the ranks is by making the program revenue driven, or eliminating fares that are conducive to mileage running. i would argue that the latter would have a minimal effect since i believe that only 1 in ~10 1Ks earns their status with MR as a large component of their PQM earnings. sure, on FT the frequency is probably 6/10 but far from every 1K is on FT.