In my opinion, eligibility assessment on all the categories is a crucial and important step. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of this task ("nothing but"?). Good to know that they do this in the first few days of AOR, so if some ineligible application is submitted, it gets cancelled, rejected early and not made to wait for later.
Although you say that "nothing is done", it appears good work was done by CIC to review documents and check eligibility. This is sufficient progress for 1 month from AOR, isn't it? Of course, we all want officers to work only on our file alone, but there are also so many other applications. It appears they have a nice operational process established.