Card Captor Sakura thoughts

I've got two problems with the ending:

1) The way in which Sakura got her second chance at beating the judge, Yue, from Mizuki smacked of deus ex machina. Why would Clow have left that bell around to, basically, evade his design for selecting a new master? Why, especially, would Mizuki have it? That one also totally failed to explain Li's suspicions about Mizuki: Just exactly why was he so turned off by her?

2) The bigger one is that we're left totally hanging as to which of the two things Sakura did - imprisoning Yue in a wind that should not normally have worked, or saying she wanted to be his friend instead of his mistress - was the one that convinced him she was worthy. Subsequent episodes, at least through 49, don't address the question at all.

I don't know if the series was originally planned to end here and then later extended, or if this was truly intended to be an intermediate resolution. It feels like the former, but lacks something to make that work.