I know people who do a lot of crazy routings to stay with their preferred carriers. As you suggest, it's not necessarily about spending more money but taking a less direct route. Personally, I won't do it for shorter trips; I spend too much time in planes as it is. But there are a couple more distant destinations where I could fly non-stop but usually will take my regular carrier with a stop instead.
>I know people who do a lot of crazy routings to stay with their preferred carriers. As you suggest, it's not necessarily about spending more money but taking a less direct route.
That generally doesn't work anymore. Almost all airlines now use a revenue model for milage awards, not distance.
With oneworld airlines (BA and AA, amongst many others) mileage doesn't affect status, it works on a different point system (tier points) that doesn't depend in cost, but largely can be gamed by breaking up a direct flight into a few stops in different "zones".
For instance, I flew LHR-CDG-DOH-KUL-PEN last year, business class, for less money that I would have spent in a more direct flight, but I got a lot of tier points for it.
Then I realised I was addicted to my BA gold status, and that I wasn't getting that many perks anyway. This year I'm opening myself up to other airlines.
That's only for award miles, but not for status-qualifying miles, at least on United (and I think also Delta). And like the original article says, people trying for status pretty much never use award miles because you don't earn status miles for those flights, so they don't really care.
