Yeah, there may have been some game-supplied hints at how to build your dot, but there weren't these cookie-cutters floating around. There was MUCH more experimentation...
Everybody was clueless including Bort and company, and they were feeling their way. All the forums were full of complaints for years about how terrible it was that the game kept changing right when a given person got his very best dot ever finished.
But then a few dots ruined it for everybody, spending their salaries on drugs and hooker dots, dots shooting themselves and each other at clubs, dots leaving the game with CTE... you never see anything about those early retired dots but a lot of them really lost their way... tragic really.
Then the gangs came in... the Addicts, Omerta, Hood, etc. etc. etc.
Then lots of complaints about "socialist" tendencies as the game morphed toward its present form.
It's a wonder any of us made it out alive.