Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ouch, releasing patch before official launch sort of proves they pirated the game themselves, which somewhat undermines defense that they don't encourage piracy.
Not necessarily. I don't know the context, but bugs/issues reported from users may have been sufficient to patch their code without touching the ROM themselves.
I don't know if there were any other issues, but at least on that one, it doesn't seem like they needed deep knowledge of the game to try reworking it.