I understand that you came here hoping to find a way to consolidate points, and then discovered that it's not really possible. However, if you would like useful advice about the best way to use your points, it would be helpful if you added some information like:

Where you live (home airport)
What your travel goals are (a few domestic trips, business class overseas with your significant other, around-the-world in First) and your time frame
Whether you are looking for travel for one person or two, and whether they can get credit card signup bonuses, and what credit cards you've already signed up for in the past year or two.
About how many miles you can accrue annually by flying and by spending on credit cards, excluding bonuses.
Whether you have a really cute sister who'd like to go to Vegas with me (just kidding).

The other advice given, about using points for one-way trips, is very good, and about Chase and Amex points. These points are great because you can hold them until you find the award ticket you want; the only downside is that to keep them active, you often have to have a credit card that has a fee. (Note, both Chase and Amex have only one kind of point, but the redemption options vary with the card. So if you had, say, 100,000 Chase points that you didn't plan to use for a while, you could open a free Freedom card, then reopen a Sapphire Preferred when you were ready to transfer them to a travel partner.)

You also have to pay attention to redemption options. For example, American Airlines (good news) has 40,000 mile round-trip awards to Europe in the off-season (October 15 to May 15), but (bad news) you may have some occasions where your only travel option is flying British Airways through London, which can have surcharges so high that you'll wonder what the term "award ticket" means. Delta is notorious for being difficult to book award tickets at the lowest point levels.

The more focused you are, the more people can help you.

Does anyone know which airlines offer one way redemptions? (For half the miles I mean; you can probably do a one way on any of them and just throw away the second half of the ticket). The last time I checked it seemed like American was the only one, but I could have missed something. We have quite a collection of miles on most of the airlines, but usually they're such a pain in the neck to use we just keep accumulating. Have booked a few award flights on USAir, United, and American.

See post #2 in this thread for a link to several previous discussions:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ay-awards.html