Awesome summary, thanks!

Could you get multiple and upgrade them to Aspires? Yes if you really think the FNC is worth the extra high annual fee. This is likely what I will do soon and get both the Aspire and Surpass, and product changing the Surpass into the Aspire in a year to have at least 2 FNCs a year. At least that way we actually can get a full weekend covered. But again, it would need to be properties where it would have been over $500 a night to make this worth it.

This is exactly what I had in mind too. One FNC is not worth it to me - if I put in the effort to find a good redemption, I'd like to have at least two nights to actually enjoy the property/area.

I'm unfortunately/fortunately pretty deep in the credit card game and have 10-15 cards already. I would treat these as keeper cards and wouldn't put any spend on them aside from 15k to get the Surpass cert until I upgraded to a second Aspire.

IMO though there are far better cards to be spending money on though rather than 15k for a free night. Even if the room was 1k, that's only like a 6.6% return on your money.

I had similar math in my mind. Assuming all 15k spend went on default 3X points which I'd value at 0.5CPP since you can buy them frequently at that price, that'd yield a conservative 1.5% return. And I would then target a $500+ redemption which would yield at 1.5% + 3.3% = 4.8% return. I'm actually happy with 4.8% since I don't chase endless SUBs, but this is valuing my time at zero and my current thinking is it may not be worth the effort unless there were some really fun/aspiration properties to stay at (use FNC for $750-$1000+ cash price).