Well, moondog, you did very well.

It also helped that NW has a 330 flying out of PDX to NRT.

After trying both NW's 330 and UA's 777, I must say that 777 is superior. Unless your seating is one of handful seats on 330, your legroom suffers vs. E+. Sooner or later NW's RoachChoiceTM will ask you to pay $15.

It's nice to get upgraded to WBC (personally I like 330's WBC more than UA's C). However, upgrade is extremely tough to get on 330 because of very low C/Y ratio. And you need to buy B/Y fares since there is no SWUs on NW. It's so much easier to get upgraded on UA. Not to mention that you need 120k miles for a saver NW C award vs 90k on UA from PDX to PRC.

Knowledge is power: a lesson learned here is that if UA can't keep the schedule we shall insist other carriers as an option. Time for me to memorize complete AA/CO/UA/NW's schedule to China.