Everyone has their own perspectives based upon their situation and their needs and wants. No one size fits all.
As has been pointed out earlier, it's very different for a high status solo passenger to request and (mostly) get what they want vs a couple at mid tier, a family with no status and everything in between.. and then some cases nobody would imagine
That's why I try to avoid generalisations and blanket statements - specially based on my own experiences because that's going to be wildly misleading to some and not reflect the experience of the majority of punters. Sure, I've been very successful in getting J and F seats released to do trips I want to do. I'm very lucky that I have a) the status and b) the flexibility (in some ways) to do this. So if I went out and said "Hey points aren't worthless! You can get most places reasonably easily" - then I should be cut down in size a bit for such a statement.
I know, for example, as a Solo P1, I probably have one of the best opportunities to secure what I want when looking for just me. Even a P1 couple will have that much harder time to secure 2 (or more) seats. Yes, it's been done (as
@Matt_01 and others can attest to) but it's that much harder.
If I have low or no status and are looking for a couple of seats (let alone more) on popular routes and popular times, then sure my chances are probably slim without a lot of planning (ie to grab 330 days out, or get lucky in a release) or.
Then again, there's those who can use points effectively for even Y travel on highly expensive routes (LDH comes to mind, or some regional routes) and that can provide value that may not be otherwise apparent.
And while I don't accrue points with AA, As or other OW carriers to use like some do, I do with UA an have mixtures of success and frustration over on that side. In many ways this is why being able to mix and match programs / partners / alliances can be the best of both worlds. Consider mid tier with QF and VA potentially has greater opportunities to build reward trips with mixed redemptions across carrier groups - eg: say SQ one way, and QF back.
Again though, that's a subset of members who have the kind of travel and earn ability to be in this sort of situation - and that's hardly the majority of folks.
So again, so many situations are different.
I do think part of the problem - in general as opposed to QFF in particular - is perhaps related to expectation - and this has been driven by the marketing of all of the loyalty programs so much that you can't blame people. Marketing is aspirational - and when it comes to this kind of thing of course it's "You too can fly Business class to London!" and that kind of thing, when the reality is often much less attainable than they would have us believe.
I remember when AAdvantage started, and all the rest that followed - the idea back then being to simply "give away" unused seats that would fly empty as a reward for some loyalty - a win/win and very simple and well understood. heading to 50 years on, things have evolved to so much more than the original idea is subsumed by the revenue based, broad based ecosystems of spending and "reward" all designed (like huge shopping centres everywhere) to keep us in as long as possible and to extract as much from us during the process - and make us feel good about it at the same time.
The other thing to remember is that, QFF for example, has >12m members - maybe more now. Certainly around half the population of Australia (and yes, I know there are, of course, non resident members). That's a HUGE number. Even if we take say 5% as a tiny number of "active" members trying to find and redeem award seats, that's over half a million.. for how many total seats accross the network? Put in those terms, and given QFF want to actually SELL the seats above all else, it really is hard just with the competition of demand. That's totally a made up figure of 5% of course, but even still.. and I've not accounted for partner FF program requests and so on.
In no way am I defending anyone here. I try to be a bit of a pragmatist / realist when it comes to things like this though. Sure, QFF can do more - to elease more seats on popular routes, to provide a better interface that isn't so deliberately skewing people AWAY from CR's unless you know what you're doing (and of course an actually functional one for partners and all the rest that works more often than it fails!) - but there is a fundamental issue that demand for reward seats will ALWAYs outstrip supply. It's a simple numbers game. Is it hopeless? no... this forum is full of strategies, hints and ideas on ways to make things work, or increase the odds - but again it comes back to expectations.
"value" of the program is very much in the eye of each beholder imo - it's what you CAN get out of it in relation to what you WANT that will, in general, govern that value judgement - and that's totally reasonable.
