Orals are not very important. Decisions are on briefs.
Those who tell you they can tell how a justice is leaning by his/her questions are all wet.
For an interesting primer on the case, google “ProArms podcast”. Their last episode was a recording of a press conference by Alan Gura and other principles in the case at the Shot Show from a few weeks ago. The audio is not the greatest, but it’s well worth the listen.
I agree with you that orals aren’t very important - it’s almost impossible to imagine any appellate judge changing his mind based on them, and any judge who says it has changed his mind is probably just trying to be polite. As a law clerk, they certainly never changed my mind, even when the judge I worked for asked all the questions I recommended in my bench memo.
Justice Scalia said it best at a dinner I was at a couple years ago, where a law student asked him, “What was the most persuasive oral argument you’ve ever heard?” Scalia’s answer: “I’ve never heard a persuasive oral argument.”
I also remember asking a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s why he never asked questions during oral arguments, something for which he is often ridiculed by people on the left. He said that Thomas finds most of the questions asked to be self-serving and not really asked as questions at all. Justices ask them to make attorney’s squirm, to grandstand, or, most often, to obliquely argue with the other justices.
Which suggests that the only use of listening to oral arguments is that you can tell what a justice is thinking, but I agree with you again. You can tell what SOME justices are leaning, but you already knew those justices’ leanings before the briefs ever came in. Try to figure out how Kennedy is going to vote based on his questions in a case like this is a waste of time.