Exactly. With respect for the previous poster, I think that very often (and I can think of some other current BA forum threads where similar accusations are being repeated), there is a misperception that whenever the dominant answers given to a question are discouraging (don't do it, this is not going to work, your case is not one the airline will answer favourably, etc), this is interpreted as moral judgement or lack of sympathy.

I don't think that any of the forum regulars are under any misconception that posters - old and new - reach out to us because they are interested in our moral judgement. Nor, for that matter, are many of us interested in sharing such judgement with anyone beyond our close circle of family and friends. The reason people reach out to the forum is because quite frankly, its collective experience and thus understanding of any and everything BA related is in fact quite extraordinary - possibly the richest to be found on this particular airline anywhere in a free and public forum. You get a panel of people from different countries and walks of life but whose combined practice of BA (and often the airline world in general) is truly impressive. In that sense, when people ask: "should I do x?" or "this is what happened to me, do I have a chance of y?" or "I have been told z by BA, is there any way to circumvent that?", 9 times out of 10 and possibly more, we have a pretty good sense (and often a fairly unanimous estimation) of what the answer to those questions. Those are based not on our preferences or moral evaluations but on our collective experience of what either can or tends to happen in real life and how painful it can be to those to whom it happens.

When many of us say "don't do this" when it comes to miles broker, it's not because we think it makes the op a good or a bad person, but because we know how it often ends in real life. In this particular case, it's not even due to our own personal knowledge but because many of us have been reading threads on this forum regularly for years and enough people have come to tell what's happened to them when BAEC has rightly or wrongly suspected people to sell their avios. When we tell people that BA is not going to allow them to freely move their flights to a different date because of a change of equipment it is not because we don't want them to be able to change dates but because we have hundreds of similar cases in mind and we know what sort of threshold BA uses to decide what entitles a passenger to a free itinerary change or not, and even what may constitute a "grey area" where you might as well give it a try and what does not.

I understand that it can be very disappointing for people to come here with the hope that we will find a way for them to get what they want only to hear that our collective experience suggests that they won't. I also fully appreciate how several posters coming to the same conclusion can be misperceived as their "ganging up" against a position, but sometimes, in life, the simplest explanations are in fact the correct ones. In this case, the law of numbers is such that when many different people have experienced the same situation very many times, chances are that their forecast of its outcome is not going to vary.

Those forecasts are not always gloomy. When we get hundreds of threads with people asking if there will be any issue if they skip the last segment of their trip when travelling with hand baggage only, the answer they get from all of us is "you'll be fine" not because we think it is good or bad but because they will be. When we get hundreds of threads with people explaining that they have unfortunately suffered some significant health issue which makes it impossible for them to take their flight, we tell them to call BA and that they will most likely be allowed to change the ticket date without issue not only because we sympathise but because from our collective experience, we know that BA will routinely help in such case. Conversely, however, when we are asked about mileage brokers, about getting compensation for something we know BA will not compensate, or for how safe it is to book two separate itineraries with a couple of hours between the arrival of the first and the departure of the second with people hoping that their itineraries will be jointly protected and their baggage through checked just because it seems to be "common sense", we can only say what we know, ie that this is just not a good idea, all the same. Whenever possible, some of us will usually add whatever other adaptation may mitigate the damage and offer a creative option, and some times, there is simply no such glmmer of hope.

Whilst I am sure that some will see this process as tough and judgemental, I have no doubt that conversely, many posters, whether they say so or not, will likely feel a little bit of gratitude for having found here exactly what they were looking for: experienced and collective advice on what could be their best course of action or what will likely be the outcome of a given situation.