The biggest issue is the combination of allowing both multiple accounts and bots at the same time. That is what makes this so exploitable. I've slowly come to leaning towards the fact that we need to limit having multiple accounts rather than bots themselves. If people are limited to one account in Splinterlands then botting would not be a big issue as you would be turning your account passive with theoretically less skill.

Allowing multiple accounts with bots encourages exponential growth of bot accounts as can be seen with the 100+ accounts of each of ru-bots, rusbots, neminers, enminers and so on. Basically they can just continuously grow in accounts at essentially an exponential rate.