Hiya!
You did the perfect thing, though! An abnormal behavior like this one is immediately recognizable because, well, it deviates from the docs. Writing in to this forum, poking the support page or emailing hello@ was definitely the right move at that point!
Yep. It was called MODE on the Core, some of the parts of the docs did not get updated when this changed. This will be fixed.
You're sensing the right thing, which is that regardless of how it's happening, it's not normal behavior for right out of the box. You really shouldn't have had this problem in the first place, I'm sorry you're having to deal with it.
We're working on docs right now to make it a little easier for people to get into the Photon. I'm really glad you wrote in here, because knowing the frustrations of folks like you really helps us develop. We can and will do new user studies, but I hope that everyone will keep letting us know on the community, through PM, and through hello@particle.io what they think we are doing wrong and right.
I'm going to leave it to @corey to answer this wifi password question.