That's a very funny interpretation of what I said

I actually meant the two other people I am going with that are traveling from CA have fewer miles in their mileage accounts and don't mind economy tickets.

Agreed my accounts are puny.

Virgin Australia has great availability, and can easily be booked using skymiles directly from LAX/SFO. You dont need to grab them at opening date, so it should be fine for the Cali travelers.

If you are booking that far in advance, you can even find some availability from NYC, but your challenge will be getting domestic DL legs to LAX.

I ended up buying a separate ticket to LAX, and used VA from LAX - SYD - AKL and back.

You do realize that by the time you figure this all out the availability will be gone. That's how it always seems to end up...

Not for me... I always start thinking ahead of time and am ready to go!

Delta charges like 150k for a business class award ticket to Australia, if I understand their chart correctly, or 100k for economy. This is why I am not considering them at all. Plus their changes to awards once ticketed are completely inflexible.

And that being said, sometimes I think it's a good strategy to book two one-way awards rather than a round-trip so that you can grab those seats not a moment too late at 330 days out. However, one-way overseas awards don't provide the luxury of getting stopovers like round-trip awards do.
There's another factor, far less predictable. The partners (QF for AA, and AC, SQ, NZ, etc for UA) release their 1st and biz class award seats on a very different schedule, which I don't understand at all--sometimes just one seat at a time. Occasionally, you can luck-out when somebody like ANA suddenly announces a new route like NRT-SJC and then suddenly there's award seats available all over the calendar until they get swooped up.
Do remember that not all airlines are made equal. For example, IMO 14 hrs or even 2 minutes coach travel in a fully packed UA 747-400 is cruel & unusual punishment at an industry low of 17" seat width, no seat back IFE and no complimentary booze. QF's Airbus 380coach offers 18.1" seat width, seat back IFE, complimentary booze...and a snack bar. And then there's coach on Thai Airways and the like, which are almost preferable over UA's bizfirst, save the inability to lie flat.
AA's pretty nice but at 330 days out, strange things do happen. I had an AA award booked on an HA route SJC-HNL-SYD about 330 days out. About three months later, the SJC-HNL flight ceased to exist and I was automatically booked on SJC-OGG and then OGG-HNL-SYD except that the SJC-OGG was scheduled to land in OGG a few minutes after the OGG-HNL flight was scheduled to depart. AA then wanted to dock me more payment because now there's an overnight stopover in HNL so that instead of one-way SJC-SYD, there's two one-ways SJC-HNL and HNL-SYD. The complications got crazier with AA keeping my original schedule but having me go SFO-HNL-SYD. When I wanted to get back to a SJC-SYD route, they wanted to charge a destination change fee.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

"sometimes I think it's a good strategy to book two one-way awards rather than a round-trip so that you can grab those seats not a moment too late at 330 days out. However, one-way overseas awards don't provide the luxury of getting stopovers like round-trip awards do."

A one-way award between North America and another zone booked with AA miles does permit a free stopover at the North American gateway.

Availability around the holidays is always hard to come by, but as guv1976 points out, with AA you can do domestic stopovers on one-ways and I believe that HNL counts as a domestic gateway.

It's a bit more round-about, and also hard to come by, but TN flies LAX-PPT-AKL and then QF from AKL-Australia.

And another advantage of being 1k on UA. I can book a one way and then change it to a roundtrip when the inbound becomes available

Everyone is saying how hard it is to use AA miles and get business class to SYD. AA site however shows plenty of options LAX to SYD currently (for my trip next year). Should I jump on these ASAP? Not 100% on my agenda but ball parked the months of travel.

I even found a First class return on Qantas' A380 for 72.5K. I put it on hold, just in case this is super rare.

Also, what would be a better travel experience?: San to LAX to HNL to SYD on Hawaiians A330 First Class or San to DFW to BNE to SYD on Qantas A380 Business Class.

Thanks in advance for any help. Noob here.

Trip is ~Sept-Oct 3-4 weeks

Qantas first class, no contest. I have never flown first on either, but did fly coach on HA HNL-SYD there and back a few years ago and it was probably the worst airline I have ever been on in terms of service/organization, plane niceness and overall experience. Everyone always says how nice Qantas is.

I always compare the downside of booking and not booking. If you definitely know you are going and have the miles and definitely want first class, then there is no downside to booking. If you decide to change dates and not change carrier, but still go within the next year, there is no fee to change on AA. I generally prefer to just secure seats in such a situation, good availability or bad. Worst case scenario, you will be stuck with the dates u have and not be able to change, but if flights are not available on those dates later on anyway when you decide you want to book, you're stuck with no flight options. This is all if you have enough AA miles that you don't need to use anywhere else before then.

Two comments.
(1) Qantas is a red-eye. HA isn't necessarily a red-eye if that makes any difference. For some odd reason, a good fraction of the ways to head west to Australia are all red-eyes that leave late at night. If you leave early in the day, you chase the sun and have sunlight the whole day. UA only does it via HNL-GUM-CNS.
(2) The charges for changes to award tickets are weird. There's a lot of permutations. If it's not a last minute change, they'll both let you change the date of travel without charge if there's no change in airlines, cities, etc, if it's still within a year of booking. If you booked 330 days out, that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room at the 365 day end. UA will charge you if you have a coach award and want to move up a cabin but AA will not. Moving down in a cabin costs nothing extra. And you get the miles back. Taxes are the same regardless of cabin. And then there's always exceptions if you have a status. They'll also charge you if you cancel and want your miles back. I once had a UA biz-first 67.5k saver award for SYD-SFO non-stop flight. I had to change my dates but of course, no biz-first awards existed for my new dates by that point in time, and I refuse UA 744 coach. I simply paid the UA gold $25 fee to change the destinations to 10k SFO-LAS award (totally different trip). The taxe$ and 57.5k miles went back to my account without additional charge. With UA gold, that $25 is better than the $100 fee to get the miles back on a true refund. It would have also been $25 to switch from UA 40k miles for UA coach 744 to AC 777 service of SYD-YVR-SFO, but I preferred the option of AA coach award via QF's 330 service for AA 37.5k miles. Later on, NZ coach service SYD-AKL-SFO became available, but by then, I was tired of shuffling my itinerary.

Thanks for the info/opinions. I think I will book the First Class Qantas SYD to LAX I have on hold. They are in Oct, and I wanted to go in Nov (to do a NZ cruise), but hopefully if something else comes up, I can grab/change it.

Trust me, I wouldn't book a first or biz award seat on QF for dates I know I can't use: the likelihood of a different date becoming available later on is nearly non-existent. Also, in the past, when an award seat was taken from QF schedule, and then cancelled, it often didnt go back into award inventory, so booking a date just as a placeholder meant that the award seat would go back to the regular, non-award inventory (there's a recent discussion about this in the QF forum).
In the last two years, QF premium award seat release has become much more unpredictable. Depending on the route, premium seats can be released anywhere from 330 to 250+ days out. Often, only one premium seat is released per flight. Seats that used to be released close to departure are usually bookmarked for QF FF members' upgrades, so it nearly impossible to get them now (used to be possible until a couple of years ago).

The best strategy to get QF premium seats now IMHO is to check the calendar frequently and grab the first dates that look like they will work for you, then plan your trip around your flights and hope that you don't need to change anything.