I'm not so sure that it's they figured it all out at the start. It's probably more to do with mantra of "Experts Exchange with out the evil" Just figure out what EE did, and then do the exact opposite.
Even if that was the mantra, that's figuring it out from the start.
That wasn't the mantra though; EE was only one of the influences.
Watch Joel's tech talk (www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ) - they really did figure a ton of it out at the start. See Joel's tech talk