Nice observations Okiedo. I've been out of the loop recently because I've been travelling (woot!) It's nice to be getting back to some sort of normalcy.

And thanks MostlyTonic for the link. After reading the 12 pages in my mind a summary of this issue is (was) as follows:

The BLM issued its RoD based on certain documents and submissions. Once the lawsuit, or appeal to the RoD, was filed, the BLM was required to submit to the court the Administrative Records (AR) upon which the decision was based. These records were the ones that the BLM deemed materially relevant to their deliberations, but did not include other records (presumably letters, emails, texts, minutes etc) that they deemed to be "deliberative", meaning they were not material to their decision but rather just supported the process by which they came to their decision. 

Now as I understand it, deliberative records need not be included in the AR, so there was no mention of them in the AR filed with the court. But it seems that RSIC was aware of certain documents that were not included so questioned why they weren't included. The court ordered the BLM to produce a more complete AR complete with a new privilege log identifying the deliberative documents, but in a nutshell the BLM just classified basically all the extra documents as deliberative without properly reviewing that they were all in fact deliberative. 

This specific motion by RSIC was as I understand it to ask for the BLM to be sanctioned for their sloppy submission of the original AR and the subsequent poor handling of the amended AR and privilege log. The specifics of their goal seemed to be centered on perhaps having some of their legal fees covered, or perhaps even forcing the BLM to disclose the actual documents through a discovery process. 

Du's decision basically agreed that BLM's process was sloppy, but not to the point of being reckless or purposeful, so denied the motion. This puts to rest the issue of on which documents the BLM issued the RoD and should stop the noise by RSIC around the BLM having ignored this or ignored that, so this is an important decision. Now as Judge Du deliberates on the merits of RSIC's case, she is constrained by the contents of the AR.

I don't necessarily see her non-committal to a timeline as a bad thing. This ruling came out very quickly, and so she might surprise us with a quick decision in the main case. She may already be well on her way to drafting her decision.