You "could" e-mail customer relations as they told you to.

This of course comes under "buyers remorse", you paid the $100 for the change now you want a loophole that maybe a 25 minute delay that occurred after you made the decision to change. Also since you called to arrange a change what makes you think a) they knew about it or b) looked or even cared to look? The call was to change, they changed. And since the change (and the fee) was from connecting to nonstop the change in the connecting flight time is immaterial. You paid to go nonstop.

I am not sure 25 minutes is enough to validly change for free either.

Also if you write them avoid annoying blue italics HTML code like here.