I just gave up. Twitter was useless: they kept responding with a canned "talk to reservations" response. My problem is that I don't tweet and don't have many followers...I only use Twitter to follow news sources and a few companies. So while the official AA handle was having lovely "I hope you enjoy your trip" conversations with people with hundreds of followers, they won't pay much attention to me.

I eventually found the Rule 240/80 language deep within AA's site. I read both the AA schedule change and "other airline" schedule change rules (since AA's agents seem to enjoy treating US like another airline). In both cases, the language suggests I should get the rebooking as long as the new flight has B availability or less. (It probably has 100 seats in B or less. ) However, the rules don't clearly compel them to give me the most direct flight...AA can at this point say "we gave you a legal reroute already."

I'm just frustrated because the *old* AA wouldn't have done this. Their agents would have made the change...in fact, they tried to here, twice, and were rejected by the US liaison. I guess I can only hope that post-merger, once we're all back in one system and the "liaison" to the other system is gone, this particular issue won't happen again.