(1) What is your home airport? (SFO, LAX, MCO, etc.) - SFO
(2) What types of fares do you usually buy ? (C, F, Y, etc.) - R,E (Premium Economy for work), lowest fares for personal
(3) How many miles do you usually fly each year? 60Kish
(4) Do you have any kind of status at present? What is it? (UA Silver, M&M Senator etc) - CX gold (OW sapphire)
(5) What is most important to you in a FFP? (Frequent upgrades on travel, priority services when flying the airline, good award redemption rates, free lounge access, etc.) - Good award reception first with lounge access a close second.
(6) Which routes do you fly most often (US Domestic, Transpacific etc) - work: (R,E codes) SFO to HKG 4x a year and SFO to PVG 2x a year. Personal: (cheapest fare class): family of 4 trip of SFO to CDG 1x a year, SFO to other westerns/midwest cities 3x a year.
(8) Do you travel for work or pleasure? (Can you choose your airlines, class of service?) mostly for work.

Part of the CX MP club. Biggest issues with CX are (1) the miles repetition for domestic flights. It is hard to book AA redemption flights with Asia miles. AS offers some domestic redemptions but most redemption flights go through PDX or SEA which is not acceptable when I am going to Chicago, Houston, or Hawaii (maybe the Virgin America merger will fix this but i have not seen any improvements). And (2) when I fly from SFO to PVG, I have to connect in HKG or take a AA flight and connect in LAX.

Looking at Star Alliance because of the amount of options for flying to Asia and SFO is a United hub. United is not the best option for Asia travel because they do not (currently) offer Premium Economy seats so if I choose them, my work would book the cheapest economy seat and I would not get full miles (got less than 5K redemption miles on an actual SFO to PVG 12k mile trip earlier this year) and it would be difficult to reach the PQD minimum requirement for status.

So, If I move to a STAR airline, I am looking to book the SFO>HKG flights on the Singapore Premium Economy for most of my Asia travel with the occasional SFO>PVG on United. Then all domestic and EU trips to be books through United.

Would it make sense to sign up with the Singapore awards program? Or suffer through the United awards program until they one day get Premium Economy on these Asia routes? I understand that I would not get any United PQD if I book that Singapore flight. so that is why I am hesitant to choose United initially.

And... If I do choose the Singapore rewards program, would I run into the same issues of having trouble redeeming flights for US domestic and EU flights?