I like to ask as well. Last week I asked the agent and was told "there's open seats". I said, "Can you tell me how many so I can help my seat selection strategy?" The response as "all I can tell you is there's more than 10 open." When I got on the plane, we ended up leaving with multiple open rows. It would have been really simple to say "all middle seats will probably be open" or "there's 62 open seats." I don't know why it's so difficult to answer that question but it would be really helpful if the company put an open seat number or a count on the app for public viewing.