With great respect, FT may have 600k registrants, but many post only once and are never heard from again, and many more -- I'd say most -- show up very rarely. The core community, after 20 years, is really no more than a couple of thousand people. (I have been posting here for nearly 19 years. Seen 'em come, seen 'em go.) And while most FTers are concerned with amassing miles and status, a very low percentage of active posters IME copped to mileage running, even in the heyday. I believe the majority of high-status regular FT posters are OPM flyers.

Mileage running, e.g. assembling very cheap itins to achieve status at low cost, was only ever a niche / eccentric phenomenon indulged in by an extremely tiny percentage of an airline's customers, to say nothing of FTers, and today is irrelevant anyway unless you are flying Alaska.

It is not unusual for "FT myopia" to take hold around here, whose symptoms are the conceit that FTers are the airline's most important / influential customers, that we collectively drive changes in airline policies, etc. But while there were isolated cases of airlines taking an interest in the collective "FT voice" before 2010, they are over now. And the sad fact is that in two decades of increasing membership, FlyerTalk has never established itself as a coherent voice in the public square, speaking on behalf of the aggrieved air passenger. Perhaps that is because, as FF benefits grow scarcer and scrawnier, FT has increasingly disparaged / attacked everyday customers, dismissing them as "kettles," etc. Perhaps it is because some on FT believe things that aren't true, e.g. mileage runners were a big, influential phenomenon.

In any case the US domestic airline industry has now consolidated into an oligarchy practicing cartel / fortress economics, so on most counts it does not need to pay attention to FT any longer, or any other codification of the "voice of the customer." We have observed nearly a decade of FF program dilutions / devaluations, service cutbacks, reductions in choice and options, etc. and cried woe is us at every turn, but the airlines don't have to listen to us -- they are thriving.