As someone who released the source of an app that was always expected to be public I appreciate that it would be interesting but I'm not surprised. If the code isn't being regularly published there is just less incentive to be sure that every commit is "public ready". So when releasing I wanted to do a full review of current code (and especially comments and docs). This was tedious enough and even though we didn't find anything major and only a handful of things that should be cleaned I absolutely wouldn't want to do this for the full history.

Could we have just released it? Absolutely. But I think everyone who contributed felt better knowing that what was released had one final "ready for public" review. Then our regular review process handled that going forward.