With the flight you mentioned, was there a hefty penalty on the payload in order to carry the fuel required?
I've done flights from Paris to KUL in the 777-200 some 6 years ago. There was a consistantly 4500kgs of payload had to be offloaded in order to carry the required fuel for ETOPS over bay of Bengal. Soon, the company opted for a route a little further up north to avoid ETOPS, and took all payload (at MTOW)we can carry from Paris.
Great topic.
