Captcha is not decentralized... or something like that. I know there's a reason why they won't do such a thing, but I'm not 100% sure what that reason was.
A couple of months ago, when i was still on my crusade to fight for the rights of the smaller players, they admitted they needed the bots to make sure people could play at any time of day... I don't know if that's still true, but looking at the players base, I think it is...
That’s what I was thinking throughout this bot convo - we need them cause sometimes I want to play when others don’t - still though, Splinterlands can have you play against their deck and that might be fun too.
If there was a way to identify bots (timing analysis and the like), human players could be given the option whether to play bots or not.