Welcome to Flyertalk, welcome to the BA forum, it's good to see you here RV7A Driver. Please continue to participate here, as you indicated there is a lot of useful information around abouts.

I always struggle with the "is is worth it?" questions, since it's very subjective. Is a Jaguar worth the money? Not to me, since you can't get many sheep in the back. Is it worth sacrificing your kid's winter coat to get the TPs? Unlikely. In between these extremes it's difficult to make a call on someone else's values.

If a Gold card, with all the relevant benefits, such as Flounge access and improved Avios availability, is worth something to you then you'll have to decide at what point you accelerate your travelling, maybe you can achieve the same objective by other routes.

One point to bear in mind is that with 6 months notice BA could end the card, there are a few Lifetime BMI folk on this forum who didn't do that well out of their scheme....