You're making a fundamental error: Purchased ticket transactions are regulated under U.S. law, subject to scrutiny by the DOT and FTC. Frequent flyer transactions are largely unregulated. So it's not just plain old ticketing as step zero.

You saw (and I saw for years, and many others in the DL forum remarked) on odd and unhelpful responses from delta.com to award search requests. Given access to courts in the U.S., I'll say if the behaviors were illegal somebody would have sued. Class action, probably - the hurdles seem pretty low. And yet to my knowledge (with lots of reading in the DL forum) courts did not intervene.

Search anomalies from paid and award searches on AA, DL and UA get reported on FT on pretty much a daily basis. It's pretty clear to me that the various databases and search platforms aren't robust compared to (what we hope is in place for) financial transactions systems. If you want more regulation of FF programs start with your congressman.

Again, I think you've found evidence of AA's rollout of the previously announced fifth tier of award pricing. If (and I think the evidence is compelling) AA's systems are impaired by caching/database sync issues, the simple presence of more tiers of award prices will mean more transaction (defined as search results thru to issued ticket at the same award mileage) failures.