I assume everyone involved in constructing the Control Code for the Tuner Dongles started out by recording the I2C stream on the Dongle coming from the Original Dongle Software that comes with the Dongle for watching TV and FM Radio.
As far as the e4k is concerned: We're currently using the OsmoSDR driver which was written by people who have access to the e4k datasheet, this driver predates rtlsdr by quite a bit, and I'd dare to say that it is unwise to modify constants used by it unless your datasheet disagrees with ours.
Unfortunately there is very little known about the other tuners, so their code is mostly just modified v4l code.