Well we know it was quick and dirty, for example the trackdisk.device used software decoding to find the sync mark until something like 2.0 even though all amigas could do it in hardware.
As far as the trackdisk.device is concerned: At the time trackdisk was written, PAULA was not yet completely engineered. In fact, it was called PORTIA back then, and PORTIA did not have automatic synchronization to a sync word. This was added "last minute". You find this in the ancient trackdisk sources. There was apparently no time to "clean up" trackdisk, and since it worked, nobody cared - there was more important stuff to do.
As far as Info() is concerned: Tripos was an academic exercise, and many details where engineered in an "ad hoc" way, without giving too much thought on the details and the implications. Look for example at ACTON_EXNEXT. This packet is almost impossible to implement correctly, and the way how OFS handled it, was outright naive and could have only worked in non-multitasking environemtns.
Trying to decode what the "correct" usage is therefore becomes a painful exercise. Especially when even official software supposedly went with the wrong interpretation.
That was not the only mistake that was introduced with FFS: OFS has a pretty useful interpretation of the read/write open mode that locked the file from other processes similar to ACTION_FINDOUTPUT, but unlike the latter, did not overwrite it. This was messed up by FFS which only requests a read-lock on READWRITE, and thus allows two tasks modifying the same file at the same time. Unfortunately, this bug was then back-ported to the Ram-Handler as well. Oh well...
You find such hisitorical errors all over the place. This is just one of them.
In case you care: You find the partition type in the mount list aka the Environment-Vector.
