The CO front line is generally not very conscious of Elite status and doesn't treat them much differently than regular customers.

While CO has addressed the standby by status problem, CO GAs usually just run the standby list and has the computer assign seats.

I'll give you a parallel example of how this very same situation was handled on UA just a few weeks ago when I went standby on an earlier flight (I'm only mid-tier there). The agent is calling standbys, and I'm not hearing my name, so I'm wondering if I'd somehow been missed or fallen off the list. I approach her, she tells me she has my name, I'm at the top of the list, and I will certainly clear. But all she has is lousy seats right now. She mentioned that she'd noticed I had an aisle seat on my later flight and said she anticipates being able to offload a couple E+ aisle seats in a few more minutes, so she was skipping over me on purpose so I could get one of those once they free up. Several minutes later, sure enough, I was issued an E+ aisle boarding pass. ^