I just flew back SYD-YVR-YYZ-LGA (departing SYD March 9th) and I'm happy to say that after my disappointing trip down the return flights were much better. The food was way better, the crew was efficient and friendly, the snack bar area was well stocked and clean. With those comfy seats and a sleeping pill it really is amazing how fast that 14 hour flight can fly by.

Echoing sram's experience, however, the one disappointing aspect was baggage processing times. At YVR, despite moving fast and there being no queues for immigration, it took about 75 minutes from arriving at the gate to being airside again for the domestic portion of the flight. The vast majority of this time was spent waiting for bags. At YYZ for some reason we arrived 36 minutes late despite leaving only 8 minutes late (and there didn't seem to be air traffic delays, so I'm a bit mystified by that - did we fly particularly slowly or something?), so that cut our already tightish 90 minute connection down to about 55 minutes... so the fact that the bags took 40 minutes to get to the transborder conveyor belt was a cause of serious stress, since our LGA flight was the last flight of the night to any NYC airport. Anyway, we made it, stressed and puffing - arriving at the gate basically right at the moment that the aircraft should have been pushing back... only to discover that the pilot and co-pilot in the security queue behind us were in fact for our flight, and we ended up leaving over an hour late after various stuff ups on the ground. And our bags made it too - but given the 1 hour delay, so they should have.

I know our schedule was reasonably tight, but those were very slow baggage processing times, especially given that these were at not particularly busy times for either airport... a point I'll bear in mind when booking AC flights in future (particularly because I'll always be having to do the baggage reclaim / US preclearance / baggage recheck shuffle at YYZ).