USAirways frequent flyer miles question

I haven't used my frequent flyer miles in a few years, but when I
recently looked at booking award travel, I was a little disturbed to
find that USAirways now seems to have the standard award at 25,000
miles one-way for a round-trip ticket (ie. 50k miles) for domestic
travel. I remember always getting FF tickets for 25k miles round-
trip. Now, there are a few sparse dates in February where I can get
a mileage saver fare (12.5k miles one-way for a round trip ticket),
but nowhere else throughout the year. Before, it seems it was always
25k miles RT and it was either available or it wasn't - there weren't
two levels of FF ticket.

Now, maybe this dearth of low mileage FF tickets is because I live in
a small town with a small airport (Ithaca, NY). I checked flights
from larger hubs, and it seemed there were many more "saver" fares
available. But I swear that it never used to be a problem to get FF
tickets from my small airport given enough lead time (3 months or so)
and the flexibility to move your flight by a day or two. When trying
to book a FF seat, it was never a question of how many miles it would
cost - it was always just 25k miles and it was either available or it
wasn't. Right now, there are zero "saver" fares out of Ithaca from
March to Dec '09.

Have they made a significant change to the FF program in the past few
years? Is it just because folks in Ithaca have used up ALL the
"saver" FF seats for the whole year, or have they just removed those
seats from routes to Ithaca all together? One of the great things
about FF used to be that I could get from one rinky-dink airport to
another, requiring 3 hops, for the same low number of miles.

What changed and when did it happen?

Thanks.

-J