will AA vacation packages earn miles based on distance?
One other exception to earning by $ paid at UA and/or DL is packages (such as the airline's vacation pages) which purposely obscure the cost of the flight vs the cost of whatever else in in the package. Since they want to reveal the division of costs in the package, they award miles based on flight distance not cost.
I guess the other way to do it would be to award miles based on the total cost of the package, but if the package was hotel-cost-heavy (with a cheap flight component) the airline might give away more than it wanted that way, unless the miles were at a smaller multiplier than a flight purchased alone would have.
I haven't seen any explanation of this case in AA's write-up so far. (I can't even tell if they've made decisions on such details yet!)