It's more that they seem unwillingly to admit that purely automated methods don't achieve optimal results when they're being fought by equally automated scams.

It's more that they seem unwillingly to admit that purely automated methods don't achieve optimal results when they're being fought by equally automated scams. They could bump their overall ranking quality significantly by blacklisting known bad-actors that scrape real sites and put up hollow shells of barely edited, machine-munged plagiarism, yet do not.