As a seasoned player of Dota watching the replays, I can see exactly what's going on. There's lots of snowballing/cheese which are the least common denominators of gameplay and least intellectual. Such dynamics would no doubt be dominated by a bot like program which is why they choose them. I could imagine that people who aren't seasoned players are impressed by this but this reads like an average wood league "south" game. People who play Dota will know what I'm referring to in reference to "south". In such games, the strategy is simple : You beat out the brute-force cheese snowballing w/ intellect. However, this is where they no doubt decided to put up the artificial red tape.

You're 100% right and being down voted for it as I no doubt will. I am not impressed because I've played a ton of games and observed a ton of dynamics. You can tell in the first 10min what level and type of game play is occurring and it isn't of the intellectual variant. It's of the bot variant. Broader Dota was designed and constantly updated to combat such gameplay. When people settle on cheese strategies or exploits, they intentionally change the game balance to prevent it.

I'm more interested in how this is achieved than what it has been tuned to try to trick people into believing. Looking under the hood, I see the same thing when I look across all Weak AI solutions : Lots of hand coded steering functions with dynamic weights populated by incredible amounts of brute-force random searching (past a human lifetime of average gameplay).

While this may secure headlines and funding, this is miles away from the real direction you have to go towards Strong AI. It doesn't seem many well funded/popularized groups understand this thus will ultimately end up fooling themselves. Point out this truth and you get down votes. Essentially the broader community plugging their ears which is why a large number of these efforts are due for a significant failure.