Source control isn't immune to being sabotaged by ill-intentioned employees. Even if they did have the code for it, it's not a simple matter of "roll the code back to this date and we're good!" because there have been library changes that the old code isn't compatible with, exploit and other bug fixes, etc. Blizzard have managed to do it not only because of their archives, but because they have far more resources at their disposal to pull it off, as well. DBG does not, unfortunately, and an accurate server wouldn't make enough money to justify the costs. As for rolling back the Freeport revamp, the problem with something like that is that it has a cascading effect of other stuff they'd need to revert or change such as quests. It'd be a big web to untangle.
Except the time to kill those cons due to the combat mitigation and lack of debuffs at level 20, makes that not really a very efficient way to do it.
Yeah, that's the unfortunate part. Having old code is one thing, getting it to run, especially after so much time, is quite another. Even Blizzard gave up on using the old client/server code (even though they did manage to get it working, in a sense), and instead focused on migrating the old data and assets to their newer infrastructure, tweaking the modern stuff where necessary to emulate the classic experience. EQ2 TLE in comparison, is pretty much just present-day EQ2 with different itemization, gated features, and tweaked encounters to try to emulate the difficulty/pace of vanilla. As we've seen from the current and previous attempts, the level of success they've enjoyed with that has been, to say the least, inconsistent.
