How to spread the points accumulation ?

So a lot of blogs suggest: pick an airline, pick a hotel and stick with those programs. The downside of this approach is that you are tied to them. You are tied to their schedules and hotel availability. And that is no freedom. Or fun. You want to experience the real matrix of having the flexibility to book anytime or time of your convenience and choose to reside at a place of your comfort. This relates to a recent experience of my flying between NYC and LA. Often times with a fixed airline and hotel approach I found that there were moments of anxiety around availability. This got somewhat mitigated as I expanded to other hotels and flight programs. This not only allowed to get cards from different banks and try them out and accumulate points in different places, but it also builds up a steady balance of diversification across various brands and thus gives you the freedom to choose geography over the math of limited choices. Hence, my strategy is now revised to go all out in o(n) fashion in just accumulating points after points from various banks. Just going all out also gives you this satisfaction that you have really tried out all available options out there. Just like in a buffet. Having said that, there are some default programs that are and should be the basis of this activity. I would say in airlines that would be Southwest and United. These are two solid airlines that cover US and good parts of this world like Asia that one would want to visit often. Of course there is Delta and American and Jetblue and others. For reason unknown I tend to avoid Delta while American is fine or Jetblue is cool and same with say, Frontier. Dont get me wrong. I am not against them. But the base is Southwest for me. There are plenty of them alright and many other airlines which are rather really good to travel and experience. Etihad or Emirates or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific among others are all solid and so are national carriers of many countries (except China and Chinese airlines, avoid them at all cost!) . Same goes with Hotels. I like Marriot or Starwood a lot. Hilton is not bad too. IHG is good and their branded card is really worth the $49 annual cost since you are not going to find a hotel room anywhere in the US in one of the IHG hotels like Holiday Inn for 49 bucks a night. I used mine in the Big Island Hawaii! :D .. one of the best night stay ever! So the revised strategy is really avoid rental cars loyalty programs, go all out and apply one by one to each hotel and air cards and keep some of those that you like even if they charge you annual like the southwest cards or the marriott cards or IHG cards. And apply Starwood or Amex cards once every couple years.