No way. I didn't think for a minute they would pay me for tonight's lodging. As of when we changed, our flight was still scheduled to leave tonight, although 3 hours late.

I agree that is a good strategy, so LONG AS there are still FF seats. Tomorrow's 8 AM flight was basically half empty, so I assume that's why there was no problem. Technically there have to be FF seats available. Actually, in our case, there were FF seats available for less miles. But! We would have had to cancel, redeposit the miles and pay some kind of expedite fee to do so, which would have cost much more money than it was worth. Re booking for free for FF miles only works if there are FF seats..