OK, thanks. It certainly seems like that MIGHT be the case! Obviously, this is all rather mysterious black-box stuff.

I went ahead and split our records. No downside to this that I can think of -- except perhaps that the computer is less likely to assign us to adjacent seats if we clear (of course, on the flight segment that already cleared, we weren't assigned ANY seats!).

I would like to know more about this "skipping" thing, though. Sometimes I travel with my kids, who are only silver elite (I only put one of them on the record with me, and one on the record with my 1K wife). We sure don't get upgraded too often. If they're skipping us over as "twos," that's pretty crummy, and there's not much to do about it (except complain to UA about the programming), because they sure aren't likely to get upgraded on their own status.