I grew up in an airline family and still have the bennies as a college student until I'm graduated. Man oh man are they worth it! Used to be you could get a lot of places out of PIT with just one leg or rarely two. Nowadays it's not so great with the hub gone, but it's not that bad either. Plus I like flying multiple legs, it's just fun to me. I won't even tell you the route I had to take to get to SAT from PIT one time!
As far as the meals, USAir doesn't provide them anymore, but when they did, we never had to "go last" that I remember. The only time I remember having to go last for the meals was flying from Pittsburgh to Frankfurt once (still got food) and another time flying First Class to Denver only because my dad didn't list us soon enough.