Flight to Africa via Los Angeles – Possible Milage Run

I have been asked to keynote an event in Kenya in June. I was looking at some flight options, and trusty United App thought a good route would be for me to do the following:

Fly from JFK in New York to Los Angeles
Fly back from Los Angeles back to Newark (the other NYC airport)
Wait nearly 12 hours, then fly from Newark to Brussels
Brussels to Nairobi, Kenya

It would take nearly three days to get there and a ton of miles, but I think I may just take the Continental Flight and skip the coast-to-coast adventure. Can’t we remove some of the complexity from these applications?