Anyone have any speculation on any direct or tangential impacts to United if this potential merger goes through?

UAL will probably offer preferential hiring to furloughed VQIA employees. April fools.. Seriously, unless someone has a crystal ball, nobody knows the answer to your question. Too early to tell. The only constant is change in this industry.

UAL upped their service between ewr-sfo and ewr-lax to almost hourly after Virgin started that route in 2013. I think you are going to see an even bigger push to wide bodies with lay flat seats to over saturate the market.

My commuting options hopefully won't change...

The reconfigured "A" model 777s being reconfigured back for the domestic configuration are also fuel efficient and fully deprecated aircraft with LOTS of F and E+ seats.

Simply over saturating the market does not necessarily help UA....but lots of room for high-revenue passengers in a widebody aircraft is a serious competitive advantage.

For the first time in a long time I'm cautiously optimistic that UAL is actually interested in competing and not simply operating.

Why does it matter? Would anyone change their employment choice or bidding preferences over this?

With all due tangential respect.

250 wide bodies by 2021 will be flown by 6250 pilots per man power staffing of a wide body aircraft (25 per plane, includes the instructors at TK)

51 767
88 777
35 A350
76 787

Best guess, we will have an opportunity to bid for some more slots somewhere in the system.

What are the odds that AS will want to keep and operate the newly acquired Airbus fleet? If not, who might be in line to obtain these aircraft?

Probably way to early to know what will happen or where the airplanes will go IF they do not keep them.

(FWIW, VA has CFM motors on their Airbuses while UA has V2500.)