I have seen a few applications for this, the main one being for dealing with removing a particularly strong grip from the hand or wrist. Imagine the opponent grabs your left with his right, down low in a kind of arae makki position. The assisted block can represent two things: 1) that the person grabbing the wrist or hand is strong and resistive and or 2) that we do not want the person to let go during the block motion as it brings us to a position of advantage - this is a common feature of Hapkido and Taekwondo SD, as you know.
Turning the arm in the 'block' motion while keeping the opponent's hand in place moves them to an awkward twisted position where it is hard for them to continue to grip strongly. The blooming hand is also a common hapkido feature - creating tension in the hand increases the size of the wrist ever so slightly while the wrist is rotated again to overcome friction and ease the coming escape. At the moment of escape, when the grabbed hand begins to pull back, the blooming hand is suddenly collapsed, momentarily reducing the relative size of the wrist and allowing things to move. The fingertips of the assisting hand are slid along the forearm and the back of the hand to assist the release by pushing in under the opponent's grip, and while the grabbed hand is very suddenly pulled back to the hip, the fingertip strike shoots forward into the pit of the chest of the opponent.
There's a lot in this movement, and it certainly introduces some interesting ideas.
Particularly interesting to note what happens when used against a diagonal grab - it forms a nice wrist lock which brings a target on the opponents neck under the ear / jawline down to just above solar plexus height.
It also puts to bed a block being a block just because it is called makki. I have had this explanation from several sources, some of them Koreans. It makes sense to look beyond blocking as applications for makki, as makki means something like 'defence'.
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