Further clarification to the above. I've _never_ booked 350 or whatever it is days in advance. My Christmas Aus trip was booked about 8 months in advance.

You will not be able to find the routing I found on ExpertFlyer without a _lot_ of work as the outbound flight is LHR-PVG on BA and PVG-SYD on QF. This would be two searches on EF and there are a bazillion variations instead of a PVG transit so it is really not practical to do it on EF. Occasionally there is phantom QF availability, i.e. AA.com will show award availability on QF but when you actually try to book it, it won't be there. That is when ExpertFlyer is useful as it will show true availability.

Obvs 3 out of my 4 flights are not on BA (which is fine by me!) but this does mean for my routing I could not have used a BA upgrade voucher or an AmEx 2-4-1.