I looked at the standard award chart for US to Europe and now understand what they did. For a Standard award to Europe it is 80K miles which will get you Economy Plus. You have not "paid" for business class award. They then put you on the waitlist for a business class award and that would incur the change fee they talked about.

This is different from my situation where I have not actually ticketed my award yet. If I had ticketed it would be as I state in the above paragraph. You have obviously ticketed already in XY on a standard award.

All making sense now.