unpopular comments *dons flame proof suit full of asbestos dust*
There's what people want which we all undersand are some great wishes, but a fair bit of ignoring the realities of how QF (and all the other airlines) are businesses. The reality is that many of these desires can never be granted as much as they might seem like a great idea. IMO anyway (and I'm sorry).
I mean for example, the family of four wanting to release 4J to say LAX for Disneyland in school holidays? Nice idea. Reality? probably very unlikely. Demand is high because.. school holidays... why would any airline give away inventory (more or less) they can make much higher yield on (specially to a popular destination like LAX)? And this is why "award guarantees" are problematic also - as discussed earlier, say they pledge to release 2J for elites and 2J for no status. Well, that STILL won't meet the family of four criteria (either the requester has status, or they don't, and while they would attempt to time it to get 2J as a status pax, and the other 2 as a non status pax then you have split bookings and all the fun and games that can go with that). Plus, what if your elite (or non) wants 3J? uh oh. nope. Then the elite feels their status is not recognised - specially if it's known well there's say a seat still available for a non status member. They'd feel cheated. That's not going to work (let alone the backend programming to make this a thing).
There's a suggestion earlier about transparency of reward availability to a flight level. I understand of course from consumer point of view - what's the point of saying x thousands of seats are released if the majority are on unpopular routes at unpopular times? If you want to get that seat to LAX you could care less that there's 10 available to Mount Gambier (just pulled at random, no offence to our friends in SA intended) on the same day. More than that, giving that information is commercial sensitive information no airline would want to reveal - because if there's space to offer reward seats, that gives opposition data on how well the route is doing and so on. comes under the "commercial in confidence" type deal.
Othert comments along the lines of ensuring access for non status members. I fully understand this but how do you make it work? Status benefits include "increased access" to reward inventory and something many Gold+ value (specially Platinum and P1). I don't know the answer (and this is tied to the examples I gave above about potential problems with guarantees of say X rewards for elites and Y for non elites). If you're a Gold and you can't get the reward but your Bronze friend can.. then why would you bother with elite status? Clearly QF is NOT going to encourage that.
Remember the basic idea FF seats started as - a way to utilise inventory that likely would not sell. That's the game. Peak high demand times - christmas etc - why would you give out this inventory to lower yielding rewards vs being able to sell in a high demand environment. That makes no business sense.. and that's why they don't do it. Same rteason people complain the peak times have higher pricing - supply and demand (and one's personal degree of cynacism can determine if the pricing is set higher in anticipation vs cheaper inventory already sold).
I'd also note as an amused aside.. wishes to get rid of Neil's leaves and other service oriented wants aren't covered by QFF changes
