You are a FlyerTalker, as am I, and so we have access to information that makes it easier to redeem. The average person who reads neither FlyerTalk nor InsideFlyer doesn't know that the classic best chance for seats is at 330ish days out (but varies by airline!) when seats (award or not) for the flight first come "on line". But only the FlyerTalker might know that that has changed at some airlines in recent times, and that with those airlines which month out the seats become available keeps changing, and if you can't "check back daily" then maybe you can only stay on top of it if you set up ExpertFlyer alerts or such. (And how many non-FlyerTalkers know about such services?)

What I predict with the most certainty is that no matter how much the system changes, FTers will be far ahead of the average public (perhaps increasingly far ahread?) in being able to get decent results from the system. Unfortunately for this discussion, we tend to know the success/failure rates of non-FTers rather poorly, because (a) most people we know personally that might have failure we tend to help have more success, and so we interfere with the "natural results" , and (b) most anecdotes we hear about from "newbies" who write (to FT, to IF, or to your local paper) about redemption nightmares are just anecdotes (and people tend to write to such places about nightmares much more than about dreams come true).