One can never tell how an appellate court is going to rule based upon oral argument. I just argued a case before my state's Court of Appeals, and my boss, my wife, and myself all thought it was a cakewalk for me. Judges hammered the other attorney. Opinion comes back 3-0 against me.
Like you, I gained little solace from this article. I'm no lawyer, but I get the impression that some justices give attorneys they agree with a hard time for sake of window-dressing decisions they'd already made long before oral arguments were heard.
The California Supreme Court has a history of "going the wrong way" with key issues important to conservatives. One of the first was the upholding of the West Hollywood city "Saturday Night Special Ban". While this clearly violated California's state pre-emption, the damn court upheld it anyway, paving the way for a decade of municipalities passing ridiculous and unconstitutional gun laws, most of which could not be enforced, but which did serve to screw up the issue of firearms possession/transport. Coupled with the Clinton Adminstration's drive to cancel private FFL holders in Cal, this decision and the local laws resulting from it drove over half of the state's gun shops out of business. BC (Before Clinton) there was nearly 30,000 FFL holders in Cal; now there is a little less than 2500. My opinion is that the Cal SC. like all other AW (@sswipe, not assault weapon)"liberal" courts, simply does not like the idea of a well-armed and otherwise unfettered citzenry. You can rest assured that when the actual issue of faggot marriage comes before the Cal SC, they will go the wrong way once again.