Yes.

We've all heard the expression it's not WHAT you know it's WHO you know.

Flying standby in J is the same thing. You shouldn't feel bad for paying, or for paying to upgrade. You might make 50k$ a year more than that person, maybe not, maybe luck is always on his side...that's just life.

If you had gotten bumped back, we'd have ourselves a conversation, I'm not sure how/why that would happen, but there's always threads that seem to have wacky stuff like that happen.