I've spent quite a lot of time talking to (two) people who were involved in the original planning, but nobody who wants to be quoted. So please feel free to treat this with the proverbial grain of salt.
I find the claim that the well-priced xASAs were nothing more than a mistake to be quite ludicrous. The more time you spend thinking about the way they were designed, the more elegant it seems. There was plenty of room to tweak things if they decided for some reason, that (say) great-circle-based pricing wasn't a good idea. But from what I've heard, there was actually an awareness that non-great-circle-based pricing was a bad (well, maybe not for QFF) idea. (And the fact that they can still get away with it for Classics? Bonus!)
And they've already demonstrated quite recently, with a hike of cash co-payments, that they can vary the pricing as necessary.
So I personally think these "it was costing them too much, so they want to get rid of them" arguments to be wrong.
I think it was purely an IT-driven thing, and that they underestimated the potential backlash, probably because it wasn't a very heavily used feature. All this talk of "too many people in lounges, too many people getting status this way" is mostly just people extrapolating from their own thoughts, intentions, and/or devious desires.
Happy to be contradicted if anyone has heard something different more recently, though.
