Updates based on recent experience that diverge from the previous LM manual booking experience:
1) The support form is reviewed by general customer service--this can be a real stalling point (prone to a lot of agent errors and misunderstanding about what manual booking even means)
2) Agent who picks up your request in #1 may gatekeep your request from being forwarded to the correct department due to their incorrect miles calculation. Agents at the frontline will sum the award chart price of each connection even if on a single ticket, and then might slam you with a "you don't have 40% of this super high number of miles"
3) Request is finally escalated to the internal department. They can sit on this for 1 week to 10 days, maybe even more. Calling back doesn't help; frontline agents will "escalate" your request but it has no bearing on outcome. You have no way to contact the internal manual booking department in any way.
4) Out of the blue, a payment link is emailed to you for the taxes. You have to call in for a booking code and itinerary and to figure out the mystery number of miles it will cost. My major gripe lies here--that after this whole process lasting weeks, I was quoted an erroneously high number of miles. There is no way to reach the internal manual booking department by phone or email to discuss a misprice. So, you're stuck at this point, no matter how badly they've messed up (i.e. mispriced award in their favor, wrong connections on your itinerary, etc.). [*] These issues do represent major deviations from what was an already frustrating and lengthy manual booking process. Namely, that now there is no direct communication with the agent who is pricing your award and that for some reason mixed-cabin multiple segment one-way tickets are being priced at the sum of each segment cost. There is no way to contest the calculation. The added time from having the levels of screening agents, inability to talk to manual booking agents directly in any way, and what I believe to be unannounced changes to their method of pricing mixed-cabin multi-segment bookings all affirm to me that LM is making it harder to book savvy redemptions.
[**]I bought a fat stack of miles for the above award. Out of pity/mercy at the least, if anyone has operational economy 3x segments to drive down a J award please PM me and let me know--that's the only way I think I'm going to be able to get fair use out of my stupidly large purchase.