I keep seeing lots of comments to the effect that AA is doing poorly because they fail to treat premium pax as well as DL and UA, but I'm just not seeing this in my own experience. Based on my own experiences and many, many posts I've read all over Flyertalk, it really seems to me that there's little difference between the US big 3. Some are better at PDBs, some have slightly better food, some have slightly better lounges, some may or may not have better crews on average, but overall it's a wash.

Whenever I fly AA, I keep my expectations low because of all the complaining I see on FT. But 80% of the time, AA exceeds my expectations and I have a good experience with them. The other 20% of the time they're not great, but they're not bad either. I've never had a really bad experience with them that wasn't out of their control (weather, etc). Of course, YMMV.