The couple devs I knew/talked to went out of their way to be very quiet in game when it came to talking about strats or drop locations/rarity, and didnt provide things external to what they legitimately could do; one played an enchanter and enchanted a few things for me when I was working on tradeskill stuff, but nothing like, hey, heres this thing I "found", and she never said a word about fight strats or bug workarounds, even when we were in VT during those few shitshow weeks of having to duel flux coh mages to get past broken warders and she was with us (she later said they had been doing that with every guild at the time), raiding on her enchanter.
They (mostly her, sometimes he would hang out at her apartment and talk for a bit) did stream on yahoo occasionally and talk about a few dev related things. GM's and guides were hit or miss though. Tribunal moving from our original GM (the name always escapes me since I didnt know him well) to Nocnivin changed the entire feel of the server, it was weird.
They did absolutely keep people from getting banned for showeq and mq2 stuff. There were devs and sony higherups scattered across a whole lot of top end guilds for many years. I dont know if that still holds today, but I wouldnt be overly shocked if it did. We had people unbanned for warping on a few occasions, with a "dont do that again" warning. Think one of them got banned and unbanned 3 or 4 times before his final final warning.