Smallman1 possibly deadlines? Most of these DJ’s are all over the map, 360 days a year, so to get them locked down in a room for a couple of days (probably more so back then) must have been near on impossible to arrange.
From what I can make out from a few of the GU bits I’ve seen on youtube, one of the locations on the DJ’s schedule would be chosen in advance. The GU boys would fly out to hold an official GU party there. It would be recorded for playback purposes, and whatever music they could afford to get published from said set would then be engineered in a studio at a later date to “somewhat” recreate the party. I guess Paul Morris (mentioned above) was the go-to guy at the time to do all the engineering.
I assume anything they couldn’t afford to get published got binned from the sequence and replaced by something more affordable that would have been agreed with by the DJ.
I might be a mile off, but that’s what I’ve understood.