Originally Posted by
nk15
Essentially, the elite levels do not matter much in terms of upgrade priority. What matters is the LPs. In your flights above, you had 16 people that had more LPs than you did. This won't change regardless if the EXP level get raised or not. If the EXP level was currently at 300k, you would probably be a PP, and you would still be #17 on the upgrade list, because you simply did not have enough LPs at that moment compared to the competition. It is simple logic.
While you're correct that elite levels don't really matter for upgrade priority[1], I think the OPs point stands in regards to other parts of the program. AA isn't going to want a program where 50% of elites are ExPlat, and 10% are PlatPro, 10% are Plat, and 30% are Gold (I'm obviously making these numbers up, but they seem relatively in line with
my personal experiences on the routes I fly). That's just way too top heavy and they're going to want to better differentiate between their various elites. This is because many elite perks
are not able to differentiate between LP outside of the status tiers. A 1 million LP ExPlat and a 200k LP ExPlat both get boarding group 1, they both get 3 checked bags, they both get MCE at booking, and they both get SWUs against the same limited confirmable-in-advance inventory. And while some of these only hurt AA (e.g. checked bags), in others having more competition is worse for the elites as well, such as overly bloated group 1 boarding (which both the OP and I have seen), or difficulties getting MCE even weeks in advance on some routes (I've seen this).
And ultimately, in a world where complimentary upgrades are fairly rare due to better first class monetization anyways, it's these other benefits where AA needs to step up if they want to keep flyers from going free agent.
[1] This isn't fully true, since lame duck status holders can still get upgraded above someone with more rolling LP than them (e.g. a 0 LP ExPlat will get upgraded before a 199k LP PlatPro). Outside of lifetime status (which only goes up to Platinum anyways), I suspect this will be rare enough not to worry about.