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and unlike the government, Google can't be lobbied to have their rules bent in your favor.

I'm not so sure, in the EU they have already had a little bit of pressure[1] but we have seen them change, 3 years ago, if you put in TSLA.US a finance.google.com result would have been the top link.

This isn't the case today for google.co.uk

[1] http://searchengineland.com/eu-antitrust-chief-google-divert...

But it works the other way around too. If the system is gameable, the system will only be successful until the gamers change.

That's Google's problem in the eternal arms race of search. Google identifies a property that good content has (inbound links, keywords in the url, age of domain), which improves the rankings for a while until the spammers figure it out and morph their content to match. And then we're left in the wasteland that everybody has to do SEO just to keep up with the junk peddlers.

Fact is, SEO is a changing game. It's part of the package to change with the times. You change or you perish.