@mandolino, thank you that makes sense, and I see that coming up regularly so clearly the idea is vital

@infradig, thank you, I'm familiar with advanced options and routing used by ITA. The problem with such wide searches is that, please correct me if this is no longer the case, ITA search times out after 60s, so you're not guaranteed that all those routes have been checked, esp when one is looking for the best price over a period of a month.

What I wanted to know the most was (1) if there was some trick of reading the fare rules and using add-ons and/or end-on-end and stuff like that. (2) if it is possible to find the best deals with "just" ITA, KVS, etc. without access to a GDS