I got on voice on SteemSpeak a few days ago and brought up this very issue in a somewhat heated discussion about bots. What you say is true. There is indeed a way of milking the system by pre-empting bot votes.

Part of me was tempted by this idea but instead have been experimenting with auto-curation on known good and confirmed anti-abuse authors so as to not waste VP when I am AFK for extended periods.

I believe manual curation is optimal (may not be optimal in terms of profit via curation due to how the bots have affected it) for promoting the best content on the blockchain but, when there is an ongoing struggle against the greed, I would prefer not to waste VP that would otherwise go to my colleagues. Hopefully, that helps you understand my rationale. I will try my best to allocate some time for manual curation every day. Think everyone ought to do the same. That is finding quality content and upvoting it. Not pre-empting the bots. I believe we need to work against the bots. There are just too many problems associated with their use.

Anyways, I had decided that attempting a bot pre-empter is too far of a departure from my principles to pursue.

I will continue experimenting with my curation script for my personal whitelist of users but the biggest problem I encounter is inconsistency on the publically available RPC nodes. If I had money to burn, I would probably invest in a private nodes.

Thank you for illucidating this problem. More people need to be aware. If we all just preempt bot votes, this place is gonna go to shit real quick.