The truth about United QOL (at present) is it is entirely base / fleet specific. West coast 756, reserve is a cake walk if you have an easy commute. Mid-continent, or east coast base on the 737/320 is a whole different game.

The best advice I have for anyone on reserve here, is use the APU and silo-1 to pick up stuff early in your reserve block that makes you less likely to be useful at the end of the block, even more so with HDOs at the end of the block.

it should not be this way, but having a phd understanding of 117 and our reserve section makes reserve here palatable. Some of the already agreed upon UPA items will make it better on first glance.

finally, yes on a global fleet it is very possible that you could get a 6 day trip on the last day of reserve, and that is a bad deal (and even worse if you had plans those days), but you still get those additional 5 days ‘on’ restored and it is very likely that you now have a block of 8+ days off.

like I said, it definitely needs to be improved, and it will be (to the extent is the question), but there are also ways to make reserve suck less too.