Originally Posted by Viajero
My suggestion: AAdvantage. Yes, I noticed the bit about AA being a non-starter, but I think you should reconsider, based on this suggested plan: use your business travels as the core and, for leisure, do one xDONEx every two years. That plan will give you, at a minum, EXP every two years, falling back (without even flying) to PLT every year in between.
Yes; this is precisely the route we're taking with our (mainly leisure) travel - use required annual travel plus semi-annual (I think that's right - every two years?) RTWs to get up to EXP, use the eVIPs in the non-RTW years, allow ourselves to fall back to Platinum [still get full mileage bonus plus (most) lounge access]; repeat. You can accumulate sufficient miles in the paid travel that you can use award tickets to position yourself to wherever the cheapest initiation point for A/DONExs might be when RTW time rolls around again.
One thing about non-Atlantic FFPs is that most require a certain number of sponsor metal flights annually to retain status (e.g. four QF metal flights etc.) That might be an issue for you given your travel patterns.