I’m settling in on cash and points that I can easily redeem in smaller quantities. I’m based out of MSP, so since most of my flights are on Delta I find MR to be very useful at topping up my Skymiles account to redeem for award tickets before all of their value erodes away.

I carry 3 cards right now:

Citi Costco - Used for Costco, restaurants, hotels (booked directly), and gas.
Venture X - default spend (services/consumables like grocery) This offers extended warranty, return protection, purchase protection, etc if Amex isn’t accepted, but preserves a 2x floor on most spend.
Amex Platinum - physical goods that can break, get lost, or be stolen.

The Venture X has become a nice single card replacement for my Chase setup. I book all my flights direct so the Platinum always made more sense there. The Venture X is super easy for “utility” hotel bookings where I don’t care about status or points (ie, 1 night at an airport hotel), so the annual fee effectively cancels out for me. With Chase you still need at least 2 cards (CFU + CSP/CSR) to get your base 1.5x on spend and then try and fight back value on redemption to get it above 2%. Even there you really can’t come out ahead on portal redemptions because you don’t get points on bookings, so 1.5x becomes 1.35x (1.5 * 90%), the Venture X earns 33% more points per dollar on general spend than the CFU, and you still have more annual fee left over to try and justify.

As for benefits:

Platinum - lounges (incl Delta Skyclub), trip delay, trip cancellation/interruption (including additional/alternate travel costs), emergency evac just for holding the card, Hilton Gold, Marriott Gold, best in class purchase protection
Venture X - primary CDW, the best purchase protections VISA Infinite can offer to compete with Amex, no FTF, good online tools to resolve many issues without needing to talk to humans
Citi Costco - single tap for membership and payment at Costco gas pumps, no FTF, no annual fee to worry about.

The biggest thing I struggle with in picking cards (and redemption strategies) is trying to avoid chasing value that others are getting but I would not. To go after a lot of the sweet spot redemptions that get mentioned for flights I have to reposition (at additional cost, thus reducing the value) or contort my schedule so much that I end up not chasing most of them. For whatever reason Hyatt also never seems to have a hotel where I want to be.