The change to the trivials was made concurrent with the release of Blue Diamond cultural (Brellium, Seafarer, etc.) at the time the patch note mentions. Prior to that, Fine Plate was the only reasonable (maybe only) way to skill up to 250. Those trivials were dropped because the new cultural (now referred to on EQTraders as 'old cultural' provided a new path. Banded trivials were dropped because they would have more or less overlapped the new trivials for FP.
I remember this really well because the devs actually detailed the upcoming changes at least a couple of weeks before they went into effect (maybe more than a couple). I was in the leather padding business on Tunare at the time, and I made a small fortune supplying aspiring blacksmiths who wanted to max out their smithing before the changes went into effect. I made a bunch more by buying up every blue diamond I could find as soon as the changes were announced. By that time, BD's had dropped to more or less vendor value, as the once prized velium blue diamond armor (for its resists) was no longer as desirable.
So yes, these changes happened and they happened in 2002.
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