You've obviously been around long enough that you 'get it'. Coverage days are usually the culprit in a bad schedule.

The benefit of seeing the pre-awards is that they would have caught that descrepency in your schedule, but the 'off the table' agreement was that NO ONE should make more work for the planners by calling them directly, and always go through the committee. Not everybody followed those rules, and now we're stuck with what minimal input the company wants.

It's true with the crap in, crap out of trips. Hopefully when the hiring/upgrades calm down, schedules will get settle out at a normal distribution.