Update from close-in rebooking shenanigans for this month: managed to swap both of us from JL 10 to JL 4 on our return date with availability that popped up at random times at T-16 and T-14. If I had to guess, at least one of these was someone cancelling/shuffling a reservation and not JAL releasing more. No dice on JL3 for the outbound trip but it was showing as sold-out on JAL's website so I'm not surprised. But as a consolation, by setting an alert for U availability on ExpertFlyer I was able to change our domestic NYC-ORD segment to a much more convenient one that was still first-class.

I saw plenty of J availability pop up out of ORD and the west coast, including some itineraries with a domestic segment to LAX on the 321T in J which wouldn't be a terrible fallback option. 351 seats are extremely scarce despite healthy availability for cash fares, I only saw one JL 11 and a couple JL 5/6 segments pop up but they were erroring out, unsure if ghost availability or what. Even JL 3/4 was still very difficult to find. Alerts from sites like PointsYeah or seats.aero proved fruitless, I assume they check too infrequently.

Annoyingly (for us), AA is selling some saver J awards out of DFW and LAX at 60k points so seeing that green "60K" bubble on the calendar doesn't automatically mean JL availability anymore.

My takeaway here is that this was probably too much work and I should spend that effort somewhere more productive so I can afford the cash fare next time