Honestly I have never had problems booking OW awards. I only just started traveling internationally again but I've booked plenty of awards on JL and CX using AS miles pre-pandemic (and if they are available to AS, they are available to AA). Now that I've started traveling again, I just booked AY business class to and from Europe for summer travel on relatively short notice with relatively inflexible dates (I'm attending a wedding so I need to be there on a certain day). I booked one way with AA miles and one way with AS (because I wanted a stopover on the return).

I feel that the people who complain about this sort of thing are mostly being extremely inflexible. They want a certain routing on a certain day and if they can't get it then they assume that the miles are worthless. That's just not how award travel works, and it has not for several years. The OP is complaining that he can't get from PHL to JFK. Sorry, but that's completely ridiculous. There are lots of ways to get from PHL to JFK, and many of them have been mentioned in this thread.

So, if people want to complain, let them. I'm going to enjoy my business class ticket to Rome for 57.5k AA miles. Those miles certainly aren't worthless to me!