You have a solution for bots? What is it exactly? Let's focus on your solution since you think mine is not going to work.

The 4th member of the Co-Operative, @rycharde, is a mathematician who does a lot of work on Game Theory, and there is in fact models you can create that give pretty clear predictions of how humans will play with new things.

He has friends in the field who can quickly build a simulation based on a series of variables that is pretty accurate at predicting it. Basically, it just models the process of people learning how to exploit the system. From this you can in fact judge the effect, before implementation, to a pretty large degree. 

I was absolutely ecstatic when he showed up to talk about what his angle was. This gives our development process some really good evidence to justify changes. He also happens to practically share my own theories about gravity and biology as well.

100%
Congrats...u just walked into the vipers den and said "i smell alot like chicken...whats the problem?"

Lol...

No but it does take more effort. Minimally more I'll grant you, but more. It is friction and the interface is not designed to work for that use case.

From reading your comments it's clear that you think this is not a solvable problem. But is that the only reason you oppose this, because you think it cannot be done? Or do you agree with self voting in some fundamental way? I'm curious.