Their example of George “the premium flyer” most fits me and is unsurprisingly disingenuous.

This guy is 75K but spends $24,000 in fares and spends $125,000 on the CC… which gets him “an upgrade” to SE.

Except George in the current system would already have been SE easily by passing $20K spending and having no problems with SQM based on the credit card. There’s no improvement here from a status point of view.

And in the current system 75K was pretty trivial since it took just $9,000 SQD and the CC took care of the necessary SQM easily (no max, bunch of multipliers, roll over). The new system this becomes much harder.

It feels like lower status is much easier with CC and mid/top status are much harder.