For another real world example, I had a relative ask me this weekend whether she could use frequent flyer miles to travel from BWI to ANC -- any day in June. She didn't want to use double miles (made more sense to buy a ticket than use 50,000 miles).

Seemed like a difficult but not impossible request. And it would be a reasonably fair test of my theory (neither city is any airline's hub). The results: not a single standard award seat on CO, AA, DL, US or NW for BWI-ANC in June (at least one you could find using each airline's website search function).

On UA, there were 3 days you could travel on.

And that pretty sums up the state of airline award availability in America these days.