ugh. It's not what you know, it's who you know
That said, this looks like a very interesting and rewarding system to hack. But it seems to serve little purpose. The other comments comparing it to Eve Online are spot on
"Better yet, if you happen to know a miner (we didn’t), you could have them include the transaction directly in a block, skipping the mempool—and the monsters—entirely."
In the bitcoin ecosystem, as far as I know, basically everyone can be a miner, right ? If you are running the bitcoin client you are mining and there is no particular barrier to entry to mining ... just run the client and mine.
How is the ethereum ecosystem different ? If they could avoid all of these complications by mining, why didn't they just fire up their miner ?
But bitcoin transactions are orders of magnitude less complex. So you don’t get these “frontrunners” at all.
The number of blocks being mined is constant for the entire mining ecosystem, so you are basically competing with all the other miners to create a new block.
That distinction is needed since, no matter how slow and painfully inefficient I am, if I am running the miner I am, indeed, a miner on the network ...