So I ended up going ahead and booking a SkyTeam award through the KE website. I had been looking for a while into flights from the east coast to Kauai and was running into an issue where the KE website was showing that there was availability, but Expert Flyer was showing that there was no availability. I had read stories of people seeing phantom availability on the KE site and getting and error after transferring the points. I checked with the Air France site and it was showing availability that matched KE, so I went ahead and picked my flights (side note: the ability to book multiple legs in an award ticket was key...it let me put together an itinerary that was much more efficient than searching from departure to destination), I transferred the points, and I clicked to pay. Everything went through easily and I was able to pick my seats on the Delta website. Now I just have to wait 320 days until our trip, but all in all a much easier process than calling into KE to place a hold or anything like that.