While I have seen that too, I rarely incorporate that strategy into my searches anymore because the phantom/non-phantom ratio is quite high. For connections beyond Tokyo, married segments often do improve availability, but I've rarely had to adopt that approach in order to find something acceptable to me. The short of it is that I find that honing in on transpacs in isolation as a first step is the most robust and efficient (i.e. fewer moving parts = fewer searches) path to success. That having been said, in cases where only one specific tpac (e.g. BOS-NRT for my senior citizen father) is of interest, I experiment with married segments, especially westbound (so there's no need to actually show up at HIJ, CTS, FUK, etc).