Two points, AA knew about the expiration date as well and didn’t staff up to handle it. Why should elite customers go out of their way to use earned benefits and make up for AA failing? If you have a store coupon and it expires on a certain day you expect the store to honor it until the expiration, not make it impossible to use towards the end.

Secondly, it’s not true that if you could find space yesterday you could have weeks or months ago. I’m not going to spent extra money just to burn an SWU. Finding confirmed space is a crap shoot these day. I looked and waited months and didn’t find anything but that’s how AA does it now. So why wouldn’t I wait and see if I can get confirmed space instead of risky waitlist?