I understand not wanting to give UA your money but are you really willing to give up 75k RDMs (let's say $7k after taxes x 11 1K MQM bonus and the 75k cap)? The VA option gives you ~31.2k SkyPesos (15.6k in total distance at 200% RDMs for a J ticket).

If you were a DL person, I'd say the VA option is the easy one. It nets 40% MQDs which puts you at $6240 (aka enough for DL Gold off one trip) but presumably you don't have the 50k MQMs that you'd need to go with that (you'd likely net 150% MQMs so 23.4k).

31.2k SkyPesos gets you a OW Y TATL flight or a perhaps a OW domestic F ticket if you hit the right timing vs. 75k additional UA miles gives you a OW TATL J ticket or a OW TPAC J ticket (or nearly if you are using partners).

It sucks to give the dollars to United but if it were me, I'd rather just suck it up because of the higher ROI.

I'm surprised that NH requires a change of airport. You should be able to go SFO - HND - SYD but maybe United isn't willing to sell that since it competes with their SFO - SYD flight (you'd have to fly United on SFO - HND and then connect to NH for HND - SYD with a long layover at HND).