There is an upside limit (in some sense) to the number of award seats someone can use in a year. Most of us do not have unlimited time to spend jetting from place to place. We have jobs that generate the income needed for other costs (hotels, rent/mortgage, food, cell phone bill, etc.) that in most cases can't be paid for with miles. People who do have a significant amount of free time and financial resources probably are not that concerned with FF miles. Thus, doling out more miles is probably not going to drastically alter the award seat supply/demand function since the recipients of the additional miles are likely to be people, myself included, who already have more miles than they can use. Just because I suddenly have another 500K miles doesn't help if I don't have the time or financial resources to take additional trips.