Until fairly recently, the forward curve basically looked like a nice asymptote going from the best bet for prices one year away (a liquid market as you say) to the expected long term mean of 20$ or so. So there was no "market" as such, only an expectation of things "coming back to normal" from wherever they were in the short term.

The interesting thing today is that the forward market (or whoever is able to dominate it, if, as you say, it's a failry illiquid market) is telling us that they expect the long term mean to be above 40 or even more. Not enough people are currently willing to bet that it will "ever" come back below that level. This IS new information from the oil markets, right or wrong.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes