Thank you for this excellent post, chatmaster.
There is one easy, nontech way to deal with this I can think off, IF we can establish good contact with the afflicted engines.
We could offer to hand harvest all those sites and turn them over, complete with their serps. It would be labor intensive but hiring some help for this would be a lot cheaper than hiring talent to devise programs to shoot them out of the water.
A real people black hat patrol. I really think it would be more efficient than the engines are at this time. We find them, they wipe them out.
Maybe this is a stupid idea full of flaws, but it’s all I can think of that is easy to implement. If we can get the cooperation of the engines, I think all kinds of affiliates will be happy to help.
There is a number of cloaking scripts freely available and RSS Mixing tools.
Are these used to create scrapers or to protect yourself from them?
Also, if you are a newbie and not appearing in the engines, or unable to climb, you should be very involved in this because these guys are keeping you down.