They were not, I assure you. Indeed it was months to get to even partial documentation of the system publicly available. Tactics were refined, information spread, and some bugs were found and exploited#. Information is always a closely guarded secret in eve.

#negative penalties from the highest level of wormhole could be used along with player used module debuffs to reduce values below 0 - on an unsigned value which then reverted to being incredibly high.

Since everyone in EVE is primarily competing against each other, this type of information is often kept close to the chest and used as leverage against others.