They were never serious about it, actually. If I had to guess, I would say it was cheap attempt by them to further deceive newbies and those unaware of their reputation, by posing as a casino which cared about the well being of their gamblers or even providing a high quality experience.
You are right, I remember making a comment stating this same thing you said here which ended up to be right after all.
They claimed the casino has been taken over by a new management, and that they were ready to settle everyone that ever lost money through a scam on their platform, we all had a long debate and discussion on this, where the 1xbit signature spammers were defending the casino claiming the casino is no longer involved in scam and will make everyone happy.
At the end of it all, it turned out like you said, and I also said back then, to be them trying to gain people's confidence again so they can further scam.
I personally glad they are no longer here, atleast, the forum is now cleaner as we no longer have their signature spammers here.
Were you around when their domain got alledgely bought (actually hacked) and some of the criminals were demanding up to 1-5 BTC for them to give it back? It was a hot mess, because in the meantime, the hackers pretended to be the next owners of the domain/casino and asked for people to post their account information for them to recover their money. A lot of inactive accounts appeared in that thread, it was very pathetic of those scammers and hackers to bite each other for such an infamous domain name.