The really troubling thing that I don't get is why RR got a pile of little blocks rather than a /12 up front. I don't know if that is an impact of broken policy, internal deployment decisions about 'right size' allocations rather than intentional deaggregation, or trying to 'fly under the radar'. If it is a policy problem it might be worth trying to understand and maybe fix any long term impact on market transfers.
IMHO, the transfer market is utterly and completely unlikely to aggregate pre-existing blocks. If you can come up with an idea of how policy could better enable doing so, I would be very interested. However, I suspect there's nothing that can be done to policy at this point which will positively impact this problem. In terms of a proposal to help the free pool, I suspect the time it would take to get such a policy through the process would exceed the duration of the free pool. (Especially if your (Mr. Hain) projections are at all accurate). Bottom line: Since we started deploying NAT, IPv4 has become progressively more painful. That pain is going to continue to increase. The rate of increase is going to accelerate. IPv6 is relatively painless. IPv6 provides a host of new opportunities. It's time to do IPv6. Owen