I imagine they had to preassemble those boards because aligning IF strips, etc. would take specialized equipment.
I put together a Hafler power amp and pre-amp. The power amp used MOSFETs on the outputs. They were biased more heavily than a normal class AB and so the heat sinks got quite warm even without any drive signal.
Did you work at an Olson Electronics parts store? Just asking, because I know they had a number of them in Ohio.
To get back to the soldering topic, at an Olson's I saw a kid returning a simple kit that he'd assembled because it didn't work. The counterman took a quick look, and then he told the kid it was because he'd soldered all the resistors in backwards.