FWIW, last weekend I called in a couple of times and the helpful agent explained to me that they were having problems all weekend getting things ticketed. Apparently something was screwed up in the computers and they couldn't autoprice awards anymore (it might have extended to revenue tix as well, not sure). They were "doing it the old-fashioned way" and this involved being put on hold for a few minutes while they "manually processed" the tickets, whatever that meant.
Again, not an excuse, but perhaps another explanation for some cases of bad attitudes in the last week or so.