DMN has some wise words there. 95% of the work in trying to research stuff like this is separating the truth from the fiction/whining/lobbying-narratives.
As for how I do research, you can go to groups.google.com and search alt.games.everquest yourself. You can also add filters to the search by adding, say, "before:2002-01-01" to the end of your search to only return in-era threads.
I search the eq-archives git repo with a semantic indexer I've got going locally (Open Semantic Search). When it's ready I'll make it publicly available, it speeds up searches a LOT and gives contextual searching. You could also build your own against the eq-archives repo, might take a few months, or you can wait for mine to be done up to you
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] It gets through about 40,000-50,000 docs a day on a good day. 3.2 million left to go, ~6 million total.