Quite interesting. I knew you and Lain were really active in towns, but personally I could never see the benefits, mainly because I thought it would be a waste of time. From the brief discussions I've had with Lain though, you were able to get in to people's accounts and whatnot? I've never been a fan of stealing, and taking accounts that don't belong to me, but each to their own :p

As for your first question; I mean really, you can create a client for any flash game that removes the dependency for the .swf file. At the heart of it, that's all the game is: you download it on to your computer, your flash player runs it, and it communicates to and fro with the server. There's absolutely no reason you can't recreate the client that mimics that communication without the .swf being there. The reason why there aren't more bots? Because it is comparatively a lot harder than your average Gaia Online program. A lot of the programmers on the sites are kids (LG programmers are exempt from this mini-rant because we're awesomecunts), and their ability extends as far as sending basic HTTP request and manipulating the .swf files. Because fishing doesn't rely solely on the HTTP protocol, they wouldn't have a clue what to do.

All this discussion on Gaia Fishing is really putting me in a mood to make a bot for it :p Next project?