To me, there isn’t much competition. Mileage Plan, in its somewhat-devalued state, remains clearly the best (least bad?) of the US frequent flyer programs, at least for someone for whom the AS network is useful. It is true that the AS network is useful for a smaller fraction of the US population than any of the big four. It is also true that Mileage Plan is no longer useful for those who aren’t well served by AS’s network (which is also true of the other four, and to an even larger extent with WN). But the others have been devalued far more than AS, in my opinion.

In the current environment, you don’t have to be good (by the standards of even a few years ago) to be the best.