Methinks you're precisely right.

What I find ironic is the sheer amount of effort some people seem to be willing to put into gaming the system, when they could — most likely — been better off if they'd just started doing the work from the start.

Like the irony of people getting DVRs for their TV, so they don't have to be "slaves" to programming schedules. NOW they instead manage to record two programs simultaneously, so they are now slaves to watching two hours of TV, instead of one...

I would love to see the code be changed so that downvoting HAD to be manual. Sure people are free to give downvotes, but they would have to find the content, then read the content (or at least put a 30-second internal timer on posts) before they could put up a downvote. And no downvote "trails" or "bots."