I think there is a funny trick inside.
I am one of those who claimed everything went "almost back to normal". However, it seems it is not.
Even though I could reactivate most of my keywords and increases some from 0.10 to 0.20 or 0.05 to 0.10, which seem somehow reasonable, I still having just like 70% of the traffic Google used to sent me.
CTR didn't change, however I receive less traffic.
Taking a very close look at my keywords stats I see many of these keywords are showing up in crazy positions like 15 to 30.
So, it seems Google said "don't want higher CPC? Ok, fine", "don't want inactive keywords? Ok, fine", but here you go, now your ads are in position 28.
This is a lot harder to see that a "sudden increase of CPC", that still hurts however, nobody complains about it now.
And it seems I can't complaing too much either,assuming its algorithm are doing what they are supposed to do and they're fair.
However, if these are keywords that used to show in position 3-4 and now went to 20-30, it seems they are still applying the new relevancy algorithm change, just that instead of raising CPC, they just made a larger queue of ads, so everybody looks happy.
They raised their bids and now the average cpc is much higher than it was a couple of months ago so you are relegated to position 20-30.
Im sure I heard an evil cackle just then, is there a Mr Burns working for google?