Well, given that Elevate's going to be eliminated permanently, why on earth would SPG and AS bring the option back?
I suspect they both realized 20k SPG -> 25k VX -> 32.5k AS was problematic especially since at the moment a number of people can buy SPG at 50% discount thanks to SPG's latest buy points promo. This was in effect buying AS miles at 1.1 cpm ($350 for 20k SPG->32.5k AS). AS has
a history of looking at large SPG dumps into brand new AS accounts rather suspiciously.