My guess is they have some systemic issue that they seem unable to fix with R space opening up at T-24. And it is ruining their upsell program because people are calling in and using their miles/instruments to take those upgrade seats instead of UA being up to ToD/upsell them to others out from under the elites.
So rather than fix the problem (keep R space from opening up) they are restricting access to the information.
In any case, it will be interesting to see if the "KVS custom browser" path still works, or how long it is until they remove access to expert mode completely.
Such customer and elite-unfriendly policies continue to be propagated. Things will definitely not improve until there's a management change.