It's interesting to think about the traditional attitude towards documentation. Back in the day, people could discover incredibly clever things, but when it came to writing stuff down and distributing the information in an organized way, it seems like you only got the "reference" documentation. The books you could get would only list the opcodes; to learn a trick like this, you'd either have to talk to someone who knew it, or figure it out again.

On the Vectrex, also a 6809 machine, the fastest vector draw routines use the stack to thread draw commands, not quite the same thing but those sixteen bit stack pointers sure are useful.