Well, I thought I was getting close to a solution. There are J seats available on DL metal with similar flight times to what I have booked now. I can book four seats for 350K each, while my current tickets were 160K each. I spoke with a DM agent to see if they would do me a huge favor by redepositing the original miles and then manually repricing the DL metal awards down to 160K since my current SM balance is only a little over 100K. The agent thought it was a good idea and put me on hold to ask her supervisor, but after about a 20 minute hold the supervisor ended up saying no because "there aren't many seats left". I know the seat map isn't always accurate, but it shows that there are 8 J seats left for LAX-SYD and 11 for SYD-LAX. I'm actually still on hold with the DM line (call has been going on for 55 minutes right now) while the agent is looking for other options.