If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would think the idea was to just get you to buy blindly. Cover your shorts at whatever price you can before you get further shafted.
The main reason why i didn't want to see cme/cbot merge. ICE getting the russell may turn out to be a good thing. The YM trading past 1615 was a welcomed benefit as well.
If I am wrong no problem. My understand, because it's when I started to trade ZC, is that everything was moving to Globex. I had read something about it a couple of months back. It sucks irregardless. I don't trust the data I am seeing. It just keeps bursting.