Was there only a single creative event, or would a continual process appear diluted over time?

If much of what we observe is composed of resonance structures, then you could easily have a scenario, similar to playing many types of resonant instruments, where a low level of energy is directed into resonant pathways and maintained.

If you've seen someone play a note on a wine glass, the energy input into it, isn't solely limited to the note you hear, but is composed of a much broader spectrum and the glass resonates and retains the energy associated with its specific frequency. Other energies are still retained, but diffused and appear chaotic.

So was it a sudden impact on a tuning fork (I don't think everything is resonant, but obviously resonant structures and properties would be easiest to observe), or the constant brushing of a violin string?

Now consider that observations of the Big Bang are not simple made in a one-way fashion. In order to interprete what happened over time by looking far out into space, assumptions are made over what the properties of space are.

If you were to take the wine glass example and reconstruct, in reverse, what the sound input to the glass, from the finger was, you'd need to first understand the properties of the glass and then invert this process.

Once you learn the properties of the glass (and air) and look "back in time" at what was input to these, you find a highly energetic, point source (chaotic information doesn't have spacial structures, until its been processed over space), that is transmitting this energy into a diffused environment with resonant structures dominating in energy content.

Now compare that to the Big Bang - you have an energetic point source, creating information that's still being detected today (we could imagine a photon travelled through space for billions of years, but on the other hand, it doesn't really exist in any tangible sense until we detect it, and you only vague predictions of where when these specific photons will be detected can be made, so for all real intents and purposes it could just as easily be said the Big Bang is still happening). The rapid inflationary period could easily be due to a rapid falling off of spatial correlations in information, the further out and back in time, we look. For example, if you look through a sheet of glass with some minor distortions, you can still determine locations and distances rather easily, but as you looked through more such glass, the distortions would grow exponentially as each previous distortion could itself be seen as more than just one by passing through other distortions, and there could be a point where the image rapidly degrades into choas, without any obvious spacial features. So this could be looking at the Big Bang, in reverse ... though if space was constantly muteable over time, this same process would, over time, occur here as well, though you wouldn't have a distorted view of time as you'd be seeing events directly and be able to extract coherent local relationships.

So, I agree that understanding how the universe evolved is important, but just to throw out another issue that goes along with this - it seems how you interprete this information is at least as much a factor in what properties the universe appears to have, as what the information specifically is - a photon is just a blip, yet you can interprete it in context as a part of a rose, or a star in the sky etc. So does the image of a rose create itself or does such an image require "an observer" able to extract the correlations in information received from it and piece them together as a rose? And you can also ask whether or not the Big Bang specifically created a Milky Way galaxy and red roses, or whether the specifics depend largely upon who's putting the photons together?