Nice research. One thing worth noting is that Cassie's Guide, that claims there to be no pad, also claims you can levitate from higher islands to lower islands. This might open a whole can of worms.
*Maybe* when sky was released there was no pad on 1.5 and you could levitate around. Island 1.5 is notably higher in the z-axis than islands 2 and 3. Perhaps after launch it was decided that levitate was OP in sky, but they didn't want to strand players on Island 1.5, as levitate was the intended way to leave that island, so they added the port pad.
Cassie claims that Noble has been pulled and killed (likely on a different server), and claims that levitate was used since there is no port pad. Cassie also seems to have been to Island 3, but not Island 4, however she claims that "no one has killed island 2". Unless levitate is allowed, there is no way to bypass Island 2, which supports that claim that levitate was allowed. Lastly, since getting to Island 4 was something very few guilds did early on, island jumping would not have come about yet, since the first jumps you can do are 4-2 and 4-3. With a 1-3 capable raid, all you could do is levitate from 1.5 to 3 and from 3 to 1. I'd honestly be shocked if Verant didn't plan on people levitating around sky and jumping from island to island. The layout of the islands allows for some really handy jumps, and if that was an accident, then its an amazing accident.
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