I normally fly Asian airlines these days, but I ended up in Y on UA a few weeks back, and must say that it wasn't nearly as horrible as I was envisioning (I used to fly UA a lot). Lots of legroom, passable IFE, SFO lounge better than anything in China, palatable food, okay service. My outbound was on JL in J (on their 787, no less), which was far better of course, but both experiences constituted me spending 12 hours in a metal tube, and getting very little sleep ("angled flat" seats aren't a whole lot better than UA's E+ in my book).