We don't live in LA, but have a friend lives in Chino Hills, and we go there at least once a year (we normally go somewhere first and then stop by their place for a night before going back). We normally fly into LAX to avoid first port of entry. From/to LAX to his home it's around 45 minutes - I don't know whether we are extremely lucky or other people being very unlucky, we never got stuck in traffic on freeways, the worst we encounter was slow moving traffic - but then there is the "carpool" miracle that we could use and we could drive faster than the cars in the other lanes.

Once we drove from Brea back to Chino Hills - it was 5pm and there were queues due to traffic lights. It's not so bad that a 15 minutes turns into a 1:15 drive, it's more like double the time.

My friend always said traffic is depending on the time of the day - so if you time your day well you can avoid the worst.

If points are more important to you and you don't mind driving - I'd stick with a great Cat 2 RI - RI are normally bigger than FI and I like them more than FI (especially for burning points since you only earn 5pts/$1. I'll make the same choice as you OP - don't complain about gas prices in CA - as of today we are paying $1.5/l (and it doesn't look that bad because USD is high vs EUR) - the oil companies are making big $ out of the low oil prices.