0=0A=10BABYA=36WOW describes the alphabet the wow 51 character string was in : 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

You needed to know this to figure out what the index of each character was in order to make the shifting work.

Was there an alternate (more correct) path to the key? Maybe.  Someone did notice some files were uploaded after the puzzle started and that was suspicious.  So, perhaps you're right.  The path we took was layed out for us after a mistake was noticed.   Dunno.