I'm about to finally cross over to the 25K threshold on AA which I never fly unless it's the only direct flight and I don't want to take a connection. For the time being this applies to only two cities, RDU and STL both of which are somewhat inconvenient on either CO or UA out of BOS. So I'm going to opt to turn the 25,000 into a free roundtrip domestic ticket that I can easily utilize for a direct flight. Yes the ticket would probably cost less than $300 but that's $300 I don't have to spend.

The alternative would be to apply for an AA card, collect the 20,000 points from that and scrounge up the balance to redeem for an economy award to Europe. But if I'm going to fly to Europe I'd rather take a Skyteam carrier and barring that top off with UA and *A. Conversely on CO I generally try to redeem for BF upgrades, ideally to Asia which yields a far greater cents/mile return on the mileage spent.