Alright, I am able to report back.
Called and cancelled yesterday. I ensured the cancellation was successful and called 888-333-0804 this morning. So, we are talking being disconnected for a few hours.
Here's a few notes:
-I previously had credits that ran until the end of October. Playing the pending disconnection game wasn't really any option.
-The winback process is much slower than it used to be. As well, I had to keep asking for things to be added. There's probably room for more negotiation here than there used to be.
-Had to deal with a credit check.
-Order summary emails won't necessarily be correct when re-connecting. Auto-pay discounts and contract terms will likely be off, for example.
-I've had to fully cancel before, but I was still grandfathered under my same package when I came back. However, this time they completely moved me over to the new package. This could be a benefit, I suppose, in same cases.
Under a 1 year contract, I was offered Xtra for $55 with ST Max and HBO included for 12 months. $200 gc and all the premium movie channels were tossed in for 3 months, as well. This is the most I've had to pay per month under AT&T, but considering I've paid basically nothing before, I'm not going to complain.
This deal lines up pretty close to last year, which also had me paying more than year's past. For reference, I was at Xtra for $35 a month with the $200 gc, no contract. However, I couldn't get ST added in and had to pay for that minus 25% off. Considering my cost of ST and that they added in HBO, they were able to have a decent argument about this being a good offer.
Could it be the offers just aren't as good? Not sure. Maybe others will fair better. I hadn't seen enough posted yet this year to get a sense what I should be looking for.
If I had to guess, they are looking at what you were previously paying per month (Having to pay for ST last year made my average bill higher) and adding a certain percentage to it, or maybe it's a lot simpler than that and they just line things up more with general new customer pricing (Xtra runs $55 a month for new customers in their first year). In year's past, the deals seemed more on a template. This took me about an hour to do, not the usually quick phone call, so something slowed it down.