I actually have a small, tin foil hat, suspicion that they did actually turn them off on purpose to see if it would tamp down on complaints about leeches by removing that initial bias. I think it just didn't take very long to see that the leech complaints and complaints of beginner mistakes just didn't vanish.
And at that point, if they've already decided to level gate, why even worry about turning them back on and why not just collect a bit more data?