If it were a matter of routine diffulty, wouldn't the Russian and French judges rated the Russian Skaters higher on the technical score, rather that presentation?
It's also a matter of what they saw and how they interpreted it. It's not a defined curve like in diving. Routines are rated by their difficulty and judges are to "keep that in mind". The system was constructed to inpsire people to do harder routines. The harder your routine the more of your sins will be forgiven, but you can always screw up enough to over write the difficulty bonus. Also depending on the angle they were viewing from some of the judges might not have realized a flub was a flub (like those tight jumps, it's possible for people to miss that because of where they're looking or what angle they're viewing from).
That's the problem with these sports. On the one side they're being judged for artistic merit, which is 100% subjective. On the other side they're judged by technical excellence but even there they aren't given real solid directions. It's not like they're told to add X for each triple sow cow attempted and subtract Y for poor landing and subtract Z for poor launches. They're told to take the difficulty and errors into consideration. What the hell does that mean? The answer is there's only 9 people who know what it meant monday night, and they aren't talking.