I know nothing about MLB, except that most of the players are better than the kids playing Little League, most of the players get paid well, and most of the players get to wear cool uniforms. (I don't, personally, think the uniforms are actually that cool, but enough people do.)
One more small fact, and this is the most significant one for this essay: most major leaguers don't secretly disguise themselves as children and play Little League games so they can absolutely blow everybody away with their amazing skill.
Let's jump from this analogy to the actual subject at hand: hacking in online games. Just for fun, I downloaded a "radar" hack that would let me see through walls and know where all my opponenents were at all times. This by no means makes me a hacker -- rather, it earns me the title any real hacker would hurl at anyone who stooped to such cheating: script-kiddie.
That said, the radar hack did give me a significant advantage over the other players. And there are more complex, valuable hacks, like the "aimbot" that turns any player into a perfect killing machine, unable to miss and always firing the instant an enemy appears.
The people who write these scripts are good programmers, applying their talents in creative ways to use meta-data and intercept network traffic and play a very interesting game.
But they're playing a very different game than the one most of the other players are trying to play. Why do they do it?
For the glory and personal satisfaction of winning. But the only place where they can get that recognition is in the lower game, the basic, unenhanced game. And of course, they tromp everybody to the point where it's no longer fun for anyone.
What if there were no Major Leagues? If every good baseball player could earn no reward for being great except by playing in the Little Leagues? We'd probably start to see some of them coming in and ruining the game for everyone else.
That's the situation these hackers face. The only popular games, the only activities with real 'status' attached are the unenchanced games. The rules-based games. So they exercise their transcendant power and exert it in the kiddie realm of lunchtime shoot-em-up games.
When the game shifts, and becomes about changing the rules -- it's a different game. Somebody needs to provide that. A forum for programmer games. Competing bots and computer-assisted humans duking it out in games designed for that express purpose.
Maybe (obviously) the most practical solution right now would be to create a TacOps server (or whatever game you like to play) that is labelled and promoted expressly for cheaters. May the best cheater win!
Where would that take games? Beyond simply writing faster aimbots and better radar assistance, what sort of levels and challenges would evolve from that? How could a game engine be designed to best allow for creative hacking? The traditional server-client model is designed to resist hacking. A distributed world, where each client had input into the whole, so each could introduce modifications that would alter the game.
Would it be better to shrink myself to a single pixel? Or make myself bigger than the entire level, so I'm looking down on it from a mile above? Or remove gravity, or replace all the air with poison, or have all the walls work like Star Wars garbage compactors? Or make everyone's guns self-destruct? Or change the end-game goal to be the first one killed, instead of the last one standing?
It would be an incredibly dull game for normal people to play. But the right kind of people would thorougly enjoy it, I think.