If you lease two or three legendary gold foils, your collection power will be bumped up by 150k and that ought to bring you into Diamond 1.
I've not met that many bots or maybe they're just bots that seem like people? The most common accounts I fought against are henry-gant and cryptokayden, not sure if they're bots or not. I haven't met any of those enminers, hbk, sbk and neminers people, so that's good.
I'm going to compare the net value of my daily reward earnings across the season to the amount I spent on leasing. I'll be buying and opening packs as well, and will also add the value of the packs to my calculation. This first season is an experiment and if it works out, I'll try again with a more streamlined approach.