I'm not so sure are right about that. The raw data, which is what everyone wants, should just be records from the various temperature monitoring stations around the world. This is not the sort of data that CRU publishes. They average it, group it, extrapolate from it, correct it and whatever to get their plots. I'm hoping and betting that there will be some way to validate the raw data. I think Steve McIntyre and his crew can do that for us - or show that it's a corrupted as you suspect.
I’m with you on this. There are all kinds of reasons why raw data would not ‘belong’ to the university researchers. As a researcher myself (although in literature, not in science), the emails which talked about blacklisting a quarrelsome colleague really got my attention — there are all kinds of ‘gates’ through which certain opinions have difficulty passing.