"Travel hacking" was almost irrelevant to the promo economics.

Hyatt got 2 actual revenue stays at a time of low occupancy in exchange for one award with tons of breakage, that cost peanuts for Hyatt to pay for at a hotel that was also at low occupancy. Even those PHs with award guests had them spending on ancillaries.

In exchange, Hyatt converted some, but not all, of those "travel hackers" (if you insist) into massively loyal customers...

FFN will almost certainly never return, but people are clearly forgetting how close we came in autumn 2008 to the Great Depression, but worse... And how that made hotel chains fight for customers, rather than act like hotel guests are an incovenience...