Departure from Newark International

Thanks to my father taking us out to Newark Airport a few hours early, we hoped to get better seat assignments on our Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. But LH in their shortsighted wisdom does not release most of their seat assignments until a few minutes before boarding. So even though we booked months ahead and requested seats together long before departure, we had to sit around at the departure gate hoping we might be lucky enough to get decent seats. We did end up sitting near each other, but we were not able to occupy the totally open row of seats with more legroom that we had been charting for weeks on Lufthansa's website,