Fees are not ideal, but sometime un-avoidable. Lots of cards charge them, ie Chase Southwest, but they give you points each year to offset (6,000 miles). So yea, you might drop $69 upfront with them, but you get 50k in miles which is 2-3 flights or about $650 if you sell them, so a fair return for $69 investment.
Also, the nice thing is, when you goto cancel your card after cashing in on it, they usually throw you something to keep the card open. Keep in mind they dropped 50k in miles to get you to sign up, they definitely wanna keep you if possible. I just got 20k in points from Citi to keep a card open.
I have a guy that buys miles for .0135 a mile. Found him on slickdeals.net, with good referrals. I've done two transactions with him in the past month and have the $$ in my paypal within minutes of transferring the miles. Downside was he couldn't send as a gift, and I didn't want to wait for a check in the mail. I figured the miles were free, so $50 pp fee didn't hurt in the end. (He had sent about $1800).
Ideally you start with the cards with no fee, or free the first year, then move onto cards where there's a fee...