I decided I'm gonna do an online MBA that will take up a big portion of the required spend, so I went for the Schwab card. I also found a referral for the green card which gives 45k points after spending $2k in 3 months, and since Amex consolidates hard pulls for multiple cards in a single day, and I need to pay some estimated taxes, why not.
Evidently it's much harder to utilize the airline credit now though. It appears that no airline still has a gift card that works for this.