Thanks again for your feedback. I went back and read the post you linked and you make some interesting points there. Based on the last five battles, it is possible to identify who your opponent is, there is no doubt about that. If there is some way to use that to see what team is submitted.. well, that's an exploit that should be closed.

Just out of curiosity I went and looked at this small spike in the modern data (blue spike directly behind the orange spike):

(submitting around 46-47 seconds precisely).
Indeed there was a few accounts that almost exclusively submitted at this time duration. That is clearly bot behavior. However, those accounts were in Bronze, and we do have liquidity bots in modern at the moment, so I will make a guess that that's what I'm seeing here.

Unfortunately, as I understand it, Splinterlands battle data is not submitted to hive, but just directly to/from the Splinterlands servers. Because of that, I can only go back 50 battles in each format for each account.