Thanks
Thanks for the insights all... I do concur with Flyerdude88 that IAD is a huge pain (DCA is 10 minutes from my house at 6am) and will no longer be part of US's network.
Pucnit, would you really be willing to connect nearly every week through CLT? That more than doubles travel time given the short distance between ATL-DCA.
Everybody has done a great job of flushing out the opportunities and it seems like there's no silver bullet here...