UPDATE -

So I had another back and forth with United and, once again, they refuse to honor any PQDs because of the "bulk" designation as everyone has been talking about above.

However, given that others say they've successfully used Ultimate Rewards point for PQDs then what we've got here is a problem of transparency. There seems to be virtually no way to know whether you're going to get PQDs or not! This is a friggin' pain in the butt which hopefully someone at United (or Chase) will do something about ... fingers crossed.