This is my goal as well, but if your purchasing authority is flexible, then I find there are still some A-fares that are a good deal for relatively quick and painless qualification (I suggest a good travel agent who is good with inventory search tools), or the new economy plus fares yield at least 100% miles and sometimes 150%.

In my recent experience over the past few years with program enhancments, discount business fares have gone from being one of the most effective ways to earn status to one of the worst ways, in terms of cost/status mile. The days of bribing customers to buy cheap business fares by offering them miles seem to be over. Cheap A yielding 300% is still to be found but getting rarer (cheap A defined as ~3.5k<fare<~5k€ on a TATL itinerary with a J feeder originating at some obscure location in the EU).

Otherwise I find I have to hunt around for reasonable economy fares that book into full-earning (H and above) fare buckets.

The trend with M&M like other programs these days, either implicitly or explicitly, seems to be toward a revenue-based program. Spend the cash, get the status. There are maybe some tricks left to minimize qualifying cost, but I am not sure the energy they require to execute are worth the return. LH seems to expect a 10k+ spend to reach SEN and maybe 50-60k+ to reach HON (maybe a bit less if you are a big corporate customer, or less if you fly F most of the time, at which point being HON is almost redundant).

The best itinerary values I have seen lately yield about 60k miles for just under 5k€, but you have to suffer on a rickety old UA 757 rust bucket from LAX to HNL, UGG, or KOA.