[randomdata]

That was a fun tangent, for sure, but it remains that you are indeed paying interest, if not directly, in a roundabout way. Credit card companies would not provide you with those benefits if you did not provide them with revenue to justify the cost of the benefits plus some margin of profitability. Nothing in the world is free. At the end of the day, your credit score is bought, as the original topic of this thread asserted.