> Airlines, especially US airlines are making billions of dollars a year by selling points to credit card companies. So in theory, they actually want as many people in the world of points as possible because they a consistent high margin revenue from credit card companies.

They want to sell as many points as possible, for as much as they can, and redeem them for as little as they can. (And in the middle, they want you to keep them as long as possible while they collect interest on the float while depreciating their value.)

> If the flight is only 50% full, then that points redemption is going to help amortize the large fixed costs of operating that half empty flight. So having a bargain points redemption rate, would look attractive. Now, if that flight is 90% full, then the airline may not offer seats to redeem with points or raise the price to something extremely high like 200,000 points.

I suspect the market for flight redemptions reflects this. The airlines would prefer that you can't redeem your points until the flight is absolutely unbookable by any more valuable means -- and for the airlines, essentially every form of cash booking is more valuable than points, since a "point" in your wallet means cash on their balance sheet. It's not in their interest to make cheap redemptions easy to find.

If I had to guess, the airlines that do early releases of award seats treat it as marketing expense. All things equal, they'd prefer that you have to hunt for them like truffles.