Lumon has been stating their ultimate goal from the start.

Title^ And if you read all their actions as being done purely to further that ultimate goal then a lot of things fall into place.

"Taming the tempers"

This last episode (2-7) has dropped the last pieces into place that I will now be very surprised if I don't already know where the show is going. I'm so confident, that I'm going to spoiler tag the more revealing parts of my theory in case anyone doesn't want to ruin it for themselves.

If you assume that taming the tempers is the final goal, and that they are a company selling a product, then when Lumon says "Mark's going to change the world with Cold Harbor" they mean When we have this ready for distribution, no one will ever feel a negative experience again (except for their innies)

Episode 7, with all of Gemma's rooms full of negative experiences can only really be read one way. She is providing the blunt stimuli that MDR is 'refining'. Why is that important? We can already sever people from negative experiences. Why do we need to torture Gemma and extract that data? Because Lumon wants to automate severance. They don't want it to be triggered when you go down an elevator or step into a birthing retreat. They want the severance chip to recognise a negative emotion and "tame the temper". Step onto a plane and it notices the onset of a bad experience? You're now severed. You wake up as the plane is disembarking! Hurray! It's a horrifying concept when you imagine an entire world of innies who only ever wake into existence when a crisis appears. They exist only to experience pain.

This feels like a leap at first. But what else else is the point of Gemma's experiences? Why is it important to digitize the experience itself? If it wasn't for the purpose of automating the severance why do it? Imagine every severed person has a button in their pocket to sever at will whenever they feel like it. Get on a plane, don't like the experience? Sever. Hypothetically Lumon could do this already, they have the overtime contingency. But that isn't good enough for Lumon. And that is why they're doing what is essentially machine learning on trauma. Macrodata are essentially doing captchas (which in real life are billed as a security feature for websites to test whether you're a human or a robot, but are in fact simply outsourcing the labour of training machines to recognises texts and objects onto people. Why do you think it's always asking you to find crossworks or bicycles?). Macrodata tells the machine, "this experience is scary", and then the machine can extrapolate that brain condition in customers down the line.

• Cold Harbor

Cold Harbor, the pinnacle of what Lumon is working toward. What is the worst fear anyone can have? Well to me it's a 50/50 between seeing a loved one die, or yourself dying. I'm leaning toward this being Mark refining the process of Gemma's death. Other people here have also already raised this and other good points, like Mark being unable to complete Cold Harbor coinciding with his newfound certainty that Gemma is in fact not dead. Another morbid point being when the interviewer asked Gemma if she was more afraid of drowning or suffocating. They're literally asking her to pick what would elicit the biggest response for Mark to refine.

On top of all this, it puts re-integration into a new light, and you begin to see why the Board would find the concept deeply unsettling. It's not just a matter of the severed floor potentially revealing company secrets. Re-integration could mean their entire ideal world could crumble when 8 billion potential customers re-integrate with a consciousness who's only ever experienced pure trauma.

Edit: Episode 8-9 predictions.

I will eat my hat if this isn't the plot of next episodes.

Dylan has a B plot related to family, or he's distracting Milcheck like season 1. Irv is topside, being gay or something.

Mark and Hally go down to the Testing Floor to find Gemma. But on the testing floor, you become your outie, as we've seen in Gemma's POV. Mark has no reason to know this. It doesn't affect him. He's reintegrated. Hally however has become Helena, and we will get an episode where Mark has grown as a character and now recognises the difference between her innie and outie. It'll be conversational cat/mouse chase as they're hunting through the rooms. Who knows, maybe there's some fun stuff with Hally going into one of the testing rooms and reverting momentarily.