Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical:

Someone is traveling to China for two weeks with spouse. For a bunch of reasons, the travel dates are fixed with zero wiggle room.

Booking 11 months out, said person got F award tickets in the first low-mileage-needed allocation for the return flight. However, they were not available for the outbound flight. Two one-way award tickets in F or J that bypass capacity controls add up to a whole lot of miles.

Paid one-way tickets on the same airline are fairly expensive. However, paid round trips are much less so. Should this person:

1. Suck it up and buy one-way outbound tickets for what they cost.

2. Buy a round trip with return before the award return flight, so they could (in theory) get back to China a second time to use the reward ticket. Then toss the second half of the round trip.

3. Buy a round trip with return after the award return flight, so the fact that they tossed the second half of the round trip will not be known until they have returned.

4. Buy a round trip on a different airline and toss the second half. This is not as desirable for schedule and FF credit reasons, but feasible if options (2) and (3) are risky.

5. Other?

What does the collective FT wisdom suggest?