The three recent destinations that went to the A380 were all single daily flights (GRU, CMN, NRT and soon NCE), so it makes sense. Somewhere along the line someone thought it would be a good idea to load the A380 onto most of the two and three daily flights (DUS, LGW, ZRH, MUC, MAN, BHX etc), those clearly do not warrant a A380 all year round and hence you see the shuffle between A380 and 777s, when times were still pretty good.
As long as those high-density traffic routes like LHE, ISB, KHI, and the entire seat restricted Indian routes stay on the Boeing, I don't see CM not being able to convince the top floor to cut the loses and 120 order never reached.
Someone mentioned it a mistake cancelling the A350s, lets just hope it wasn't a fatal mistake!