I've been able to hit the Surpass $15k free night in less than 3 months with my $2k limit primarily through MS, but it did require a bit of float from my savings to achieve this and it wasn't super easy. Personally, I have a massive tax bill coming up as well, so could prepay some of that in Q1 to meet the SUB.
I want to go for the Aspire too, but decided to postpone that for now, given that I am at 3/24 already with the HSBC card and I want to get at least 1 Chase card, and not get to 5/24 so that I can still apply for biz cards.