Obviously, it's very disappointing and discouraging. The conspiracy theorist/paranoid side of me wants to think that this is EX giving into pressure from their lender customers, who, without an informed public with any real visibility into their own credit scoring, can approve, reject and set rates with little or no explanation to the applicant other than the standard "due to information in your credit report" bit.

I just really hope that this is not the start of a trend where all three reporting agencies end up going this route in the long run (or that more and more lenders end up using EX scores because they are not transparent to applicants). Ultimately, we have to take it upon ourselves to do all the things we discuss and learn on these forums to improve and maintain our scores, but with every monitoring tool that is taken away from the consumer, we have to put out more effort to make sure that our creditors are not mis-reporting on us and lenders are not exploiting us.