Just FYI datapoint: Months ago, I considered a vacation to Japan over Christmas. Nonstop J flights LAX-HND were 180K miles. No sAAver availability for the direct flights. I set up an EF alert and forgot about it as my plans changed.
I just got an alert for December 13, direct J tickets only 60K sAAver miles each.
The good news is that AA actually opened up that flight for sAAver. The bad news is they did only did it 8 days in advance, making pre-planning pretty difficult.