Because there remains an unanswered question: what small cut some other folks are going to get.

The only way to answer that is with an auction. Just like in the above analogy, the only way to determine your eBay fees is to actually have an eBay auction.

And they did have an auction, but the presiding judge didn’t like the auction rules. They can change the rules and thus change the cut, but the winners won’t change.