Nice, but a little scary.
Yep, I noticed that project itself is little bit scary

I still think we should not have had off-the-shelf bots readily available until after time warp is fixed.
well, now you have reason to fix it faster
I worry this may create much risk for the chain.
not that much
What "chain branching" issue are you referring to?
Well, all thous stales you complained about. I patched client so that requests current chain state from nodes every 10sec. But it is more like a temporary patch. I think there is couple of minor issues, which prevent normal message relaying&sync.
Your map filter is not exactly what I expected to see, but it is short and sweet. I like it. My map selection slows down map generation quite a bit, relatively speaking. I might hybridize the two and see what happens.
It takes ~0.5sec in my solution.
Likely this sort of architecture and approach both will not last much longer, for various reasons.
Yes, it is more like quick and simple solution.
I am curious about your approach. Hope to see it in future