I also like to direct people to the following https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
Also "no way a rag-tag team beats.." is straight from the plot of the movie Moneyball which is what we're talking about here. Also no-one is talking about GDPR which could stop this (please see below).
We're talking several orders of magnitude here. It's not comparable to the moneyball sitch.
The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.
I think you're right just wanted to highlight that some seriously impressive tech was applied. Any suggestion that it was a exclusively Russia/Ukrainian team that did everything could be a distraction so that the whole issue can be lumped into the popular dialogue. I'm sure there was a Russian or two on the real team.
The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.
It's a tempest in a teapot.