dfiler- I'm a pretty aggressive rider. The trails I ride are chunky and techy, dry, Colorado front-range trails. I am pretty savvy to suspension, but this felt more stictiony than I thought- it very well could be that it just needs to break in, but with the fork at recommended PSI and the compression all the way open, it's tough to even compress the fork very far, and, like I said, I am only getting about 60% of my stroke.
The blue knob is your compression damper. Typically, the damper has oil flowing through it- either in an "open bath" or enclosed "bladder." Either way, the oil/ fluid is flowing through the damper assembly and through various ports. When the blue knob is all the way open (counter clockwise), it's allowing as much fluid to pass through those ports as possible. As you turn the knob clockwise, you are, in essence, closing off those ports, making it harder for the fluid to flow through and thus harder to compress the fork. All the way clockwise is "locked out" (though it will blow through if it needs to on a bigger hit to prevent damage to the fork). FixieDave hypothesized that it could be that some of these ports are clogged, but, again, I'll probably give it a bunch more rides before I take it apart- just wanted to see if anyone else was experiencing similar stuff.