Thanks, that's a cool analysis.
Get yourself a copy of 'Digital Gold' by Nathaniel Popper. The latter stuff is kind of irrelevant, but it's very good at covering the earliest stages.
And you're right. It was very extremely quiet for quite some time. Via passages in that book you could tell that Satoshi got very excited if one person showed the slightest interest.
I took it and started reading it.
So indeed it seems that nothing was really happening apart from a bunch of people testing Bitcoins. I can believe it, even though somehow it doesn't fit the apparent productivity of Nakamoto.