Hahaha. I found a way in. It is through the flight timetable link to access all the sectors Cathay is flying in the coming year. This turns out to be a booking page, not a timetable but it offers multi city and redemption. So I tried to book MN/BKK/HKG/MNL which would have worked easily under the old booking system. I tried for next May and June to have a good chance of finding award seats. The new booking system requires me to enter every sector so I had to break the first day into MNL/HKG and HKG/BKK. It required me to specify which airline I wanted for each sector. Firstly it quoted 50,000 miles which is the same as under the old system. Then I searched the flights. WOW. To go from MNL to BKK (previously specified on Cathay) I got MNL/KUL/HKG (on MH) followed by same day HKG/KUL/BKK (again on MH). For the BKK/HKG (specified on Cathay) I got BKK/KUL/HKG (on MH) and for the 3 week later HKG/MNL (again specified on Cathay) I was give HKG/NRT/MNL (on JAL). And all for 50,000 miles. Who on earth approved these systems before they were launched to the public?