I had a similar experience with AF. I had a OW award from IST-CDG-LAX. There was no availability to get back to SFO as the non-stop was completely full even for a paid ticket. I was told that I would have to book a OW on DL to get back to SFO which I did. They told me that it had to be on two separate tickets. The AF flight ends up getting into LAX a little late but as usual at LAX, the baggage belt was broken and the baggage took 1 1/2 hours for my priority bag to come out. This made me miss my DL flight. When I explained this to the AF rep they just told me there is nothing we can do with an attititude that they really didn't care that I missed my flight due to AF and their infrastructure at LAX. After much arguing with the neighboring agent getting involved as well, the agent finally put a note in my DL record explaining the problem and DL gave me no problems when requesting to get on the later flight. I know full well the risks of getting two separate tickets but in this case, AF reservations actually booked the two reservations and AF had access to the DL record. All I asked was to simply write an explanation to DL so that they could see that the baggage belt problem caused me to miss my flight. In the end he did it but not until I had to argue for 35 minutes with two different agents who seemed happy to refuse to do anything for me.