And besides, while I admit it's sometimes not that easy to find, only once have I not found something that worked. Maybe it's partly the routes people fly. We had 2 A seats DCA-SEA before a partner's schedule change blew the reservation apart last week. But we easily switched to JFK-SEA, still in first class. So it's definitely out there.

In the end, since I'm always connecting to/from much better seats on partner awards, even if I ended up in transcon Y it wouldn't be that big of a deal to me. People can come up with all kinds of self-serving 'reasons' why they should be able to get what they want, though.