Originally Posted by cmtlatitudes

This is my biggest concern, that although I've allocated most of my miles now, it's almost irrelevant due to exactly this. There'll be a point, if there is a devaluation, where any schedule change is basically an automatic redeposit.

The majority of my speculative bookings include Qatar. Over the past two months I've had four (of four) QR award ticket schedule changes tank badly enough, that the only viable option was canceling, adjusting dates, and starting over. Even for things that seemed like they should be easy, AA strangely struggled to fix. But either AA has huge swaths of time blocked to awards for next year, or QR isn't making them available, and each time this happens its increasingly difficult to find alternate selections. Ironically I'm working on the latest (#5) right now.