anybody wondering what took them so long to let us know the possible new tracks the aircraft may have taken, Inmarsat data, etc?
I'm probably biased by being in the telecom engineering industry, but calculating the signal strength boundaries to create a 2-dimensional range would take a good bit of effort. Not to mention, if I'm at Inmarsat, my model is going to change based on every piece of new information that comes in regarding the possible actions undertaken during the flight.
Imagine you're holding your cellphone, and some guy looking at two towers worth of signal strength data is asked to find you. In a 2-d world it wouldn't be that difficult. I could pretty easily nail you down to two points. But now, get in an elevator, and I'm going to have a hell of a time mapping your movement.
In this scenario, going only off received signal strength data between two satellites, I have to figure out a boundary for a high and low signal that I want to say you crashed in. Now I look at all of the other data but some critical pieces are missing. I don't know how fast you were moving between two points when the satcom pinged, I don't know your changes in altitude, and on top of that, I don't know what interference or noise could've been introduced into the system at any given time by your environment or your actions on the plane.
I'll guarantee you one thing though - every hour spent by an RF engineer to limit that range saves somewhere on the order of half a day's worth of ocean to cover.
This is an incredibly complex system with limited knowledge of all of the variables.
To describe the difficulty, it would be like me asking you to find out which cows your hamburger came from after visiting a random McDonalds. You could probably limit it down to a few slaughter houses, but you'd never be able to pinpoint the cows.