The community was not fully known back then (at least not in 2009, post-launch). It was possible to play around with the bitcoin wallet software back then, let it mine some coins from your desktop, and read the bitcointalk forum but not post on the forums or trade whatever you mined until it was worth a few bucks a bit later.
I was one of those people (might have been early 2010 for me though, can't quite remember when I first became aware of bitcoin, but it was pretty early). I remember seeing the post about bitcoin first being exchanged for pizza after I had a bitcoin wallet. I read the forums sometimes but never posted (which is odd, because I posted on a bunch of forums back then).
Of course if I had a time machine I would have been mining nonstop back then, instead of just briefly to play around with it, and held on to it until much later. I thought it was cool but at the time I thought if it was successful it just meant it would get up to roughly the same value as a US dollar, i.e. $1 for 1 bitcoin, and wouldn't go up much beyond that.
By the way, I held on to my coins for as long as I did in part because I was super paranoid about fucking up my transactions, so I get where the OP is coming from. For a casual user they probably don't want that stress. Hell, whenever I do a transaction to another wallet now that's more than $50 even today I check the address three or four times and still sweat a bit until I see it go through.