yeah, I've had this happen a few times where AS is showing 4500 miles for a short-distance AA flight, but the purchase screen burps with something like: "The flight you have selected is no longer available. Please select another flight or date."

if AA offers the same flight for over ~9k, it basically tells me that AS is still seeing the lowest level availability ... so the issue isn't so much a deliberate devaluation of the program as it is the accuracy / currency of the data they're pulling from AA