The reason it makes sense to settle something like this is that it's a bunch of what-ifs and would be hard to prove either way. How important is recruiting for getting people to switch jobs when it's well known you can get a higher salary from job-hopping and some people already do it? Particularly since there is also competition from other companies not in on it, and many people ignore recruiters.

It's never going to be clear whether the settlement was overly generous (a bit of unearned money for us) or whether we would have done much better if it had never happened, so the settlement should have been higher. The illegal collusion stopped, so I guess that's successful government action? Since the market for software engineers was and still is pretty robust, it seems like you could just as easily argue that it was a big success or that it made little difference.

It just seems weird to question the settlement now. Would you want to re-argue a settlement for some bankers who supposedly got screwed a decade ago? Aren't there more important injustices in the world that are still going on?