Good points, and I agree with your implicit evaluation. Seriously and sincerely, you should write a (print) book about all these bits about earlier days; even if it turns out to be rambling recollection it would be very valuable to future keepers.
With some species -- some of the dart frogs, I'm thinking of, especially the mimic species -- there is both locality info based on actual collection point (publicly this information is quite general in the ways you mention, but presumably is precisely known), and an empirical knowledge of the geographical variance in pattern types, including known pattern intergrade areas, based on published research.
These are animals that were collected and exported for breeding by the collector, which is a very different situation than one in which WC animals enter the hobby market -- that's a matter for a different discussion, perhaps, but at least tangentially related and certainly equally important.
In any event, some locality info is better than none. For example, rosy boas were mostly kept pure to "locale" or former subspecies. And regardless of the specificity of each so-called "locale", that certainly helped minimize the number of interspecific rosy hybrids in captive stocks now that there are two species. Though unfortunately there's a fair amount of intentional hybridization of rosies going on lately, at least that's theoretically possible to track in a way that simply breeding any old
L. trivirgata together would not have been.
Knowing some details of the sorts of export shenanigans that you mention helps us better understand what our captive stocks actually are or are not, too.