Except for the part where AA wasn't exactly doing well pre-merger.

Many of the issues I had post-merge and eventually jumped ship over were the logical consequences of continuing pmAA policies. IRROPS happen, but mass strandings at hubs don't have to happen every time there's a drop of rain. They did on pmAA, though, and continue to post-merger, because pmAA's Baghdad-Bob routine has been left fully in place. Which leads to "on time" boarding and closing of flights which only get you to a hotel room for the night (and that only if you're lucky).

I've said it over and over: pmUS would start proactively rerouting people well in advance, or just admit there was a problem, cancel a flight and leave people at origin instead of overloading its hub with stranded passengers. pmAA would do everything in its power to pretend the flight was fine, it's on time, the weather is clear and beautiful, there's nothing to worry about... until "uhhhh... from the flight deck... uhhh... looks like, uhhh... DFW is in uhhh... ground stop for the next three hours, so we'll be uh.... sitting here...."

Last month I decided to give it another go and burned some miles on an SFO-PHL run in F. The 5.5-hour return flight ended up being over 10 hours gate-to-gate because the mentality has infected the pmUS side of operations now, too. Never again; I'll find some other way to spend down my miles, and keep flying DL and AS (and KL/AF for my TATLs -- no Heathrow for me!). Even with DL's recent network outage they're still light-years ahead on reliability.