No, there probably weren't, as part of the initial fork/launch.

There was never any intention to change the proof-of-work as part of forking bytecoin (unlike BBR which did intend to change its proof of work). It was never even discussed. So no reason specifically to look at it. Certainly none of us (meaning the people approaching this from the outside community, as opposed the bytecoin people) had any reason to suspect that it had been (likely) intentionally crippled, as we discovered later. This simply did not happen.

You have to remember at the time this was just yet another coin fork, not anything like the (somewhat) big deal it seems to be today. The thread discussing the original fork was maybe a few dozen messages, and relatively few participants. At the time few even cared much about it.

There were some other things that were changed (penalty-free size, coin supply, etc.) or fixed (coinbase transation mining bug) so those parts of the code were definitely looked at right away, but those had nothing to do with slow_hash.