bribro

I don't know a lot about the MR program, but from my limited understanding those three airlines are among the worst MR travel partners (especially Elevate which transfers at 2:1 and miles are redeemed at ~2 cpm). So those are very poor examples if you're trying to justify the value of AmEx MR. Of course booking award tickets takes much more strategy than booking with cash using a card like the Visa Black Card, no one is arguing that.

If you're happy with 2% cashback, that's fine, and it works for a lot of people who want to keep things simple; however, let's take a real world example that shows why MR/UR can be vastly superior to a cashback card like BC: You have a last minute trip that comes up and you need to fly SFO-LAX today. The cheapest flights are ~$200 in coach according to Hipmunk and Kayak. If you paid with your BC you'd get your 2%, or $4 in cash back (and you'd accrue a handful of airline miles for the short trip).

Alternatively, you could transfer MR points to BA Avios and book a nonstop SFO-LAX flight on AA for 4.5k miles, which gives you a redemption value of ~4.4 cpm. If you were transferring with a 50% MR to Avios transfer bonus, your redemption value would be ~6.7 cpm. And if you were using PRG bonus categories to get as much as 3x on spending, your cashback equivalent would be as high as 20%, an order of magnitude better than the palty 2% the overpriced BC gives you.

And that's why many people who play this game prefer real airline miles, not the fake "miles" offered by BC and others.