Gee, do you really think this was a bit of manufactured drama for the extra eyeballs? No kidding! The guy runs a business. Some of you folks need to get out more.
As for the indirect routing thing, well, you hardly need the likes of me to tell you, but that's at the very hot, molten core of the whole frequent flyer ethos. Never go direct when you can connect. Never go Y when you can go J. Never go J if you can go F. Even if it takes days or hours longer. But since this is Flyertalk, you already know this, right?
I've never understood any of that even for a moment -- my time is valuable, at least to me -- but I actually had to do it once, for business reasons, a decade or so ago with a client who wouldn't sully himself with a non-stop flight in Y at all, let alone a TATL all the way to DFW. Drove me crazy. We missed our connection, of course, but as things turned out I did get to fly across the Atlantic with the most famous rock & roll star of all time, the guy who invented it. I think I was the only one who recognized him, too; either that, or everyone else was being discreet like me.
As for some of the other posts above, I honestly don't understand the spirit behind them, so completely and utterly antithetical to the way I think.