That's an interesting STEEM history lesson and I was recently looking for something like this to explain why I found an account that was farming STEEM from other accounts. (over 250)
To me, it looked like STEEM was given away during the account creation process as a POW stake, but your story suggests otherwise.
The only problem with a start like this is, these account handles will never be recovered, and the ones I found were very short common names that people could have used.
I'll continue with my research, and quote this article in my post when it eventually is released.
Yeah that's not cool. Good point.