Well, in the end of July I applied for BofA Travel Rewards for it to complement my existing BofA 1-2-3 Cash rewards card and to become my 1st choice card abroad because of its 0 FTF and chip-n-pin technology. I was immediately declined and, frankly saying, was quite pissed off as 1) I have been recently approved for Chase, Amex and Discover cards, 2) my existing BofA card had the lowest limit among all my other cards and, the most annoying, 3) my relationship with BofA dated back to 2008 when I was a student in California and opened a checking account there which I continued to use until now...
So, I was really close to axing off all my ties to BofA, close checking account & the existing card and forget this bank forever after wasting 2 HPs on them over the last 6 months (they declined my cli request for the existing card in April too), but decided to give it a try as a last chance and give a call to a backdoor number from the respective list here.
After speaking to several CSRs (all of whom were really kind and helpful) I have been finally transferred to the senior credit analyst, who asked me a couple of questions about what I do for living, what my company does in general and why my credit file was so thin (my oldest account is only 1 yr old) and told me that in most cases they'd like to see at least 3-5 yrs of good credit history to be approved for a second card with them, but in my case of good handling of the existing card and other cards I had he can make an exception and approve my travel rewards card with $2000 limit.
The biggest surprise - as long as this is the travel rewards card he asked me if I am leaving any time soon and when I answered yes, he offered me to overnight the new card for free for "already been waiting for it quite long"... Frankly, haven't expected this from BofA (maybe I was underestimating them, who knows ;-))
In fact, I'm quite surprised and really happy. BofA definitely has proven to be not the worst bank in terms of their CSR 
. And the only conclusion I can come up with is an advice to everyone that has already been posted here multiple times - ALWAYS RECON if declined or at least unhappy with the conditions :-)