You do realize fruit issues were in no meaningful way related to bots, but instead to keeping hundreds of maps loaded into server memory by alts locked with permissions and that the decay based mechanics completely missed it's point that was rewarding player's activity in the area ?
I would not use the distiller plugin in the from it was originally published because it was, and I think still is, unreliable. And I do not consider that a proper botting unless it walks all my rows of alchemist tables without being stuck at the corners. The whole point of plugins was to make up for stupid UI deficiencies like items being too small to click with a mouse or opening dozens of small windows only to place one thing in each window.
Also, fruit salad is a great food if you know how to make it.
And, no, ***** over the data sent to the client will not change anything in terms of bots, except adding some extra server and client load. As long as texts and images delivered to the player are recognizable, there is a way to intercept these in the code and exploit. It is the other way around, one can imagine measures to prevent easy combing of data to spot bot activity.