After taking a break from this thread and coming back. I am increasingly skeptical that there is a new hard limit. It does seem that it has gotten harder to get approved for cards, and some people have been TOLD there is a limit by CSRs. But there are still people getting approved with more than 4 cards (myself included). Or see
http://millionmilesecrets.com/2015/0...omment-5373599.
I'm not sure that we can rule out the fact that they tightened things up a little bit, and then we've had a lot of people quoting each other. For example all of the blogs are basically just quoting what they read on this thread. This isn't like the situation at Citi, where it is very clear what their approval policies are and length of time you must wait before approving. We just have some anecdotal evidence right now. At this point, I wouldn't stop from applying for a new card just because I had more than 4 accounts opened in the past 24 mo.
Also, I think it is really unlikely that this is targeted at churners. Churners make a small amount of their business, cost relatively little, and many even promote Chase's cards. The bigger issue for chase is people defaulting on credit card debt.
For chase, they will spend $200 to buy 40,000 points from whatever partner, and this is cost of customer acquisition. Pretty much everyone on this thread is a 'churner' to some degree, but how many are really out there? 1,000,? 10,000? On the other hand, there are lots of people who are getting into financial trouble, applying for credit cards to make ends meet, and then not paying them back. Chase is much more concerned about losing $5,000 from someone maxing out their CC and then defaulting than paying a few extra sign up bonuses. This is why it is no easier to get a 'lowly freedom card' than a CSP. Someone can default and cost Chase just as much money on the freedom card as they can on the CSP or Ink card.
Pareto's rule says that 20% of the customers are responsible for 80% of the cost. These 20% are not churners, but defaulters. (Not that churners are valuable, or that chase will make an effort to keep them, but they aren't going to be making major policies around them either).