I'm sure that stats such as % of seats out of service on 777s is a trade secret. But I cannot remember an AA 777 flight in the past year that didn't have at least one seat taped off. And it seemed to me that at least one plane had the new J seats (so they refurbished J without refurbishing F, even a clearly beat-up F cabin). Converting those coffins to suites is clearly taking priority, even at the expense of missing a cabin cycle. I can live with the dirty carpets and the leather upholstery is generally in good shape, but not much fun when the seat goes into manual mode. I perceive a big change from 2006. As for the service improvements, all the changes in food/wine are unambiguously to reduce cost; in some cases to wines costing half as much, so a big drop. For a while AA had better food and sometimes better wine than BA, but no longer; now BA is ahead again by quite a large margin. For example, AA used to serve the same champagne in J (and F) as BA served in F; but that was 2 years ago, now the AA F champagne is at the BA J quality.

The ranking out of HKG is the same for both F and J in my opinion (rather unusually so, most routes differ in this). With CX having a big lead, QF/BA close together (more a matter of taste, I'd pick QF), and AY quite far behind now (for a while AY was surprisingly good but has also slipped).