Some things that I've discovered while trying to book both normal and award tickets on nwa.com in the last month.

1. If an outbound flight requires an extra connection, such as SIN-NRT-HNL-SFO, the nwa.com feels it must assign you the extra connection inbound, despite SFO-NRT-SIN being available. This is awful, not only for how many people would be lured into thinking that they had to take the extra connection, but also suckers people into buying Rulebusters inbound when standard awards exist. If you select "Choose Flight", you may be able to overcome this limitation.

2. Beware of using the Search Only for Standard Awards function. In many cases, this function skips over standard awards when it shouldn't. Furthermore, if you search for standard awards in business class, it will reject standard award availability in economy (and choose rulebuster), even if it's for the shortest leg in your trip.

3. Mileage Upgrade search... shocked to find that sometimes I could find upgrade availability sometimes by using the multicity search instead of roundtrip. It's as if a stopover releases some seats that would not be available if it were a connection, despite the same 2 hour layover.

Ugh... that's it for now. I think there were other stupid and illogical searching problems as well... will post them when I remember.