I agree with the general consensus here re: the direction of the program. My concierge is nice enough, but only does the bare minimum required; she has never in 5 years gone out of her way or been creative about ways to go above and beyond or personalize anything, etc., and certainly nothing like giving me a little flexibility on rules or benefits beyond what is published. I primarily use email - her turn around time is fairly reliably ~24 hours (rarely much less or much more, except on weekends when it will be next business day). She's mostly useful to chase down administrative things such as getting points to post properly (which, to be fair, is a meaningful benefit given the time I'd otherwise have to spend on it).

As a point of comparison, in a few months since I've attained Marriott Ambassador, the program has provided generally faster service (disclaimer: much smaller sample size given the few requests I've had during that time) and has the distinct advantage of having proactively reached out to a property, unprompted, to confirm a complimentary upgrade two weeks in advance of my stay. That's the kind of above-and-beyond concierge service that can make a program like this particularly useful, though I understand that my experience here may have been a fluke/one-off.