Time go give an update on the issue I reported back in post #73
And the SUCCESSFUL outcome

I made numerous phone calls to BA and got the runaround in various ways from customer service agents making things up when they didn’t know what the reason was (for example: the problem is you have too many visits to Doha), to the Fares Team responses that seemed like an attempt at the death of a thousand cuts (and got me feeling a bit paranoid!), to supervisors who were not at all interested in hearing my views on the matter and just wanted to repeat what the fares team had said and get me off the phone.

Finally on Tuesday I got a supervisor who was prepared to listen (a top guy – does BA have the equivalent of AA’s AApplause Certificates, because I want to acknowledge that he went the extra 1.6km for me (he’s based in Germany)
I asked if he was familiar with the Oneworld Explorer rules and he said he had some knowledge
So I started explaining, and he very quickly called a halt, saying “I’m sorry Sir, this is beyond my knowledge. Would you be willing to send me an email detailing all this? I will send it on to our Round the World Team and Fares Team for their views and I’ll commit to getting a response back to you by c.o.b. tomorrow”

Would I be willing!! You bet I was willing

True to his word, he emailed me late the next day – the Round the World Team agreed with me, and Fares Team agreed with the Round the World Team! By late Friday I had my new itinerary set up, paid for and ticketed. I’ve been into the Qatar Airways web site this morning and selected my seats for all the flights. So, all’s well that ends well I suppose. But it got painful at times.

Thanks to all who made suggestions and wished me luck. In the end I focussed on the obvious, to the layperson, interpretation that the first column in the table below is merely describing the type of backtrack and that it is the text in the second column that specifies the resulting restriction. I also pointed out that the on-line tool allows* new itineraries with inter zone flights and that there were a number of anomalies that arose if their interpretation were correct.
* The changes to the online booking tool, that I reported in post #89, have now been removed (testing in production?)