Not that this would be hard to do, for an airline with a half-decent IT staff. I recently flew US for the first time as a 1K, and I was checking their website to see if I had any chance of an upgrade (the answer is no, by the way). For their elites, they do complimentary upgrades based on status, fare basis, and then YTD EQM. That seems like a much better system than time added to the DM list. Also, I liked that they had a very clear, very explicit flowchart on their website explaining all this, unlike the morass of confusing links and conflicting information on UA's site.