Discover and Amex tend to not be very forgiving. Amex in particular blacklists some people for decades. When I ruined my credit, Discover let me take a hardship plan resulting in the balance getting paid off over time at 0% interest...but what they didn't tell me is that the account is closed immediately, can't be reopened upon completion, and they'll blacklist for 7 years. I really loved Discover at the time, enough to try and save the account, but had I known the outcome, it might have been better to just straight up burn them lol. Let's be real, when financial distress and ethics collide, money talks and BS walks. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive.
I managed to go 7 years without having any open credit cards using a combination of cash and Discover's 1% back debit card. It was arguably better than paying fees to predatory lenders for low limit rebuilder cards and getting pigeon-holed into that whole mindset. I'm of the opinion that you want to act like where you want to be, not where you are currently stuck. Once the COs fell off, I still had loan lates, but my EX and TU scores regained the 720s, enough to play ball with prime cards, so I went straight for prime cards.
Using the "prybar" strategy, I got a $5K Savor One that became $10K 3 months later. It was off to the races last year with that acting as the prybar to obtain more nice cards and with more conservative lenders. I "discovered" (bad pun yes) that there are a lot of options out there and the card market is very competitive. Your old banks can be replaced with new ones and you may find you love the new ones.
It sucks to wait, but sometimes that's all you can do. I still won't have a clean scorecard for around 2.5 years, EQ won't be clean until the last month, and there's literally nothing I can do about it but wait.
There are a lot of good alternatives to Discover and Amex, regardless of what your overall strategy/goal is. The thing I actually missed most about Discover was the customer service, the actual IT card was hard to use. That thing was very decline-happy and couldn't be used at all for trains due to an obscure technical problem that the MTA has with the Discover network. Many of the rotating categories were for chain stores that I don't have nearby, or things I don't buy. Likewise, everything Amex offers can be found elsewhere, although Chase and Citi can be hard to get with a dirty scorecard in the current economic environment. I burned Citi in CO and they let me back in after 8 years. Sometimes, you luck out.
I don't know that it was a crush (well, maybe, sorta), and it isn't a secret that I got my Amex Plum card simply because I liked the look of it... Very likely the silliest reason of all to get a credit card, but it's worked out well and been a good card for me.
I suppose I opened an amex checking account mostly for the all grey debit card. Looks like a serious card, lol.
