You don't need experience to avoid cheating on that kind of torrents, just common sense.
Not to mention the higher bandwidth usage. But what you're talking about is a subset of the "if no one is downloading, you can't be uploading" argument, something which is actually true but has yet to be taken to the form of anti-cheating scripts in a 100% effective way, which is impossible.
Anyway, I think that if you were a tracker admin and the amount of cheating on your site grew to such proportions, you should lower the river (i.e. check what's the real reason for it, and how you can fix that) instead of raising the bridge (coding every time tighter scripts).
well not quite true
thats the point in what.cd banning the old version of deluge and azureus.
their cheat scripts match the downloaded amounts with uploaded amounts, and find discrepancies.
so if somebody cheats and reports upload that isn't evenly reported as download within the swarm, it will trigger alerts and the swarm will be investigated.
this is actually already done fairly efficiently on what, but deluges habit of over downloading, and azureus habit of reporting very low upload speeds when not seeding has been creating a large amount of false positives within this type of cheat detection.
there will always be factors that cause upload/download amounts to never match perfect, like a client crash before an announce, but thats where what.cd's scripts become so impressive. they detect uploading when the torrent file hasn't been snatched. they detect repetative incomplete downloads when the torrent file has been snatched. they also detect repetative missed announcements(stops, scrapes, client exits, torrent completed, etc.).
the banning of azureus isn't simply because its ease of cheat mods. dont you think the what staff know it has spoof mods that let it mascaraed as another client. the ban is more because of the low, false upload amounts being reported to the tracker, causing false positives in the cheat scripts.
it'll be interesting to see what methods you come up with next. personally i find it much easier to do what the majority of fair users do and do nothing, just leave my client open and let it seed. instead of spending hours upon hours trying to work my way round anti-cheat scripts, and creating new accounts after being banned.
