Is it viable then to develop my own program and assemble a team in order to scout for opportunities on all the exchange sites, as a hand-developed bot would be legit? And since the concept of arb is legit it should work out overall.
The answer is, "maybe."
The problem is because arbitrage is a known concept, but crypto is a fairly new and niche space. With certain markets, especially for new coins, you will definitely be able to make a profit from arbitrage - even probably manually - but when it comes to major exchanges, I'm unsure about the effectiveness of common strategies. You'd have to innovate or get lucky, I think.
What about sports arbitrage, I can see that working out quite well but I'm not too familiar if that is a common enough occurrence to really happen. In sports arb I dont see why the user can't just bet on both outcomes and simply profit on the same match. I've seen the concept before but I'm not sure why its not being more widespread than what is is currently.