There may be tell-all interviews to come, perhaps, and the chapter Ewen McKenzie promised to devote to it in his book the night he resigned as Wallabies coach last October.

There will be rumours and yet more innuendo as the rugby community struggles to make sense of who were the goodies and who were the baddies in the ugliest chapter to unfold in the history of the game in Australia.

Not a single character was left untarnished after the Kurtley Beale texting scandal came to light.

But only a public airing of grievances in a court of law would have gone close to painting an accurate picture of what transpired under McKenzie's ARU-backed management of the Wallabies between August 2013 and October 2014 and why it ended in disaster.

A team without a coach, a coaching career in tatters, a business manager in distress, a playing career on a knife's edge, and a game in turmoil.

There are so many questions that remain unanswered, but the plain fact is that the Australian Rugby Union could not afford to have its case heard in court.

To fight Patston's claim of adverse action under s351 of the Fair Work Act, the ARU would have exposed itself to scrutiny of its own myriad management failures.

For it was ARU chief Bill Pulver, backed by chairman Michael Hawker, who created the structural environment where power, mistrust and disrespect festered within the Wallabies. They were responsible, and they are the only two figures, along with Beale, who remain in the game today.

The problems did not start when Beale inadvertently sent an ugly text message to Patston in the idyllic surrounds of Sanctuary Cove last year.

The problems started when Pulver handed absolute power to McKenzie when he anointed the Super Rugby title-winning coach successor to Robbie Deans a full year earlier.

Pulver had sound reasons for doing so at the time, including the failure of the high performance model as it functioned when Deans coached the Wallabies and David Nucifora was in an oversight role as high performance manager. That relationship was riddled with mistrust, but hindsight will prove there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the structure of the two roles.

What the new chief executive did not have was any high level experience in sports administration. So while Pulver set about saving rugby from financial ruin - a challenge he deserves credit for meeting and conquering - he trusted McKenzie to make the right calls on the rugby program. Crucially, after a mass clean-out following the John O'Neill era, there was no one in a senior management role at the ARU to help share that burden, apart from long-standing team manager Bob Egerton, who resigned after clashing with McKenzie over his handling of the 2013 spring tour Dublin drinking fiasco.

It was this utter lack of sporting street smarts within the ARU that allowed everything else to tumble like dominoes in the 10 months that followed. Pulver handed McKenzie the keys to the castle, and the new coach took it upon himself to not only resurrect the Wallabies' on-field performance, but its off-field efficiencies as well.

Instead of worrying solely about how Australia could win back the Bledisloe Cup, McKenzie became equally obsessed with cutting costs. Among a raft of measures designed to help get the ARU back in the black - but with nothing to do with rugby - the Wallabies coach asked staff to fly premium economy instead of business class and was observed taking issue with matters as small as wastage in the ARU kitchen.

In this climate, encouraged by the boundless remit granted by Pulver, McKenzie deployed Patston's skills - none of which were verified by the ARU upon commencement of her employment - as a catch-all business manager.

Part mother-hen, part psychologist, part accounts clerk and all-around trusted adviser, Patston, who began her career in rugby as an administrative clerk at the Queensland Reds in 2012, came to wield extraordinary influence over every aspect of the Wallabies program.

The Beale incident, which saw the Wallabies playmaker fined $45,000 after a bitterly-fought tribunal hearing, was the culmination of growing tension, fuelled by poor team performances, that centred around Patston's role within the team. McKenzie had been aware of discomfort surrounding her ever-presence, having confronted his squad about it in Europe in 2013. But there was no resolution, and her role grew from office-based adviser to full travelling member of the team during the 2014 season.

The rest is well-documented history. Tuesday's settlement, which was accompanied by a statement recognising the "distress caused to Ms Patston and her family and friends" and followed an $80,000 payout in October last year, closes the chapter.

But it leaves so much unanswered, and means both Pulver and Hawker may never be asked to fully account for their inadequate steerage of the game during this dark time.

No wonder an out of court settlement became the ARU's only option.