Idk loramin, bored at work so I decided to just start reading the old allakhazam enchanter forums, there's pretty thoroughly documented explanations of exactly how to use charm the way its used here. I was surprised at how many people specifically cited how incredibly fast they were leveling by charming.
There's definitely some posts suggesting that charm breaks incredibly fast, but the posts I see from enchanter's in their 30's and 40's in the year 2000, one notable post from 2000 citing "At level 16 Enchanters become the most powerful solo class in the game" and goes on to describe exactly how you would use charm to beat two monsters up and then kill them both.
"If you know how to charm you'll do just fine soloing" from 2000.
"Charm should last a good while with high charisma on a blue and wizard NPC's are by far the most damage you can get for your mana. Way more mana efficient damage then *anything* a player can do." from 2001.
Saw a handful of specific mentions of charms lasting anywhere from 2.5 minutes to 5.5 minutes without breaking.
Lots of posts of people having to explain that Charisma drastically improves how long charm lasts.
http://web.archive.org/web/200201292...s=13&start=450
I just started from the back and went forward while searching "charm". From what it looks like to me, a few people did figure out that enchanters were incredible at soloing and how to do it, and there was just a lot of people who never learned how to do it. The posts from the very few people citing that enchanters are primarily a grouping class are also some of the same people saying shit like Ranger's are good at tanking.
I actually have a lot more trust in the handful of people raising their hand like, "Hey...you guys know this is fuckin busted, right? Charm kiting is insane, why isn't everyone else doing this?"
Considering there are people, today, right now, that I've grouped with who still had fundamental misunderstandings about basic EQ mechanics...it's far more likely to me that charming is just a bit more mechanically complicated than the majority of other ways people soloed or grouped. Stigma also carries a ton of weight during various times...if the perception was that Charming was dangerous, despite it not actually being so, then Charming was dangerous and enchanters would all agree that it was too dangerous to do in groups and you'd get yelled at for doing it in groups. The same kind of shit applies all across a variety of games, just look at the meta from Vanilla WoW, it wasn't until just before BC dropped that people realized druids were valid raid tanks and had enormous long-term threat generation and huge damage mitigation because they were perpetually told Warriors were the only viable raid tanks. You can't even replicate that in Classic WoW because they use different talent trees now, that weird era is totally lost. There were plenty of misconceptions that were propagated that were bullshit during that time but everyone went along with because people are dumb and don't try things.
I mean just look at grouping. I've had people try to defend that grouping is the best way to level when it almost categorically isn't for most classes. People still sit in unrest spamming LFG because they think its "the best place" to level meanwhile they spend 4 hours dealing with trains and corpse runs in order to try and control like 8 blues on 22 minute timers in a full group. It's not that farfetched to me to think that most people at that point in time didn't get charm kiting because it was too complicated and the prevailing sentiment was that grouping was the only way to level.