A couple of things that came up over 'Tier-maggedon': 1. the changes to allow sector qualification were said to be heavily influenced by the number of commuting staff who would miss out under the original plan and 2. it was mentioned on a couple of occasions as a potential reason for Gold being pushed so far out of reach of many people that it was an extremely rare status for staff to be given within BA, limited to a small number of senior managers only. I can't really vouch for whether those things are entirely true, but it was interesting that they were mentioned at the time.