> (which I don't think existed at the time anyways)

This surprised me at first because I remember using Python to create Minecraft maps early on, or at least in the beta.

But it seems like redstone was added in the alpha, and the earliest commits of pymclevel (which I think I used) also dates back to the alpha. So there might indeed have been a time window of a few months in which redstone was available but not tooling for creating maps.