Agreed. There are a bunch of well-known and less-known systems errors/ glitches/ ambiguities that favour flyers and the less detail given in public forums the better.

This type of comment along with the completely inaccurate coverage that crops up in various blogs now and again perpetuates the myth that these multicarrier awards are some sort of golden tickets. There are in fact numerous behind the scenes controls employed to prevent obvious attempts to exploit the headline grabbing opportunities they present. Challenges to the permitted routing is the most obvious. Agents typically don’t know the rules and rejection typically comes just when you expect the ticket to be issued. You can structure a reasonable deal on occasion but for anyone thinking they can string a random group of flights together and save a mountain of points I know from experience you will waste a huge amount of time and get nowhere.