"In a perfect world, we'd be able to offer specific, targetted guidance for authors whose posts were likely to be shot down, before they ever showed up on the site, and without requiring as much up-front effort from our community."
So you're wanting to use an automated system (which one might loosely term a bot) to prevent content from being displayed without having to have that content moderated by humans.
How is that not replacing moderators [in part] with "bots"?
Because it's not making the final decision on weather a question will be allowed or not. It just aids in providing the user advise about how to improve the question even before the user has asked it.
The problem right now is that the user mostly has very little opportunity to improve his question, because most of the time it has already been closed, and has very little chance of getting opened again (unless the question is flagged for moderator attention).
"In a perfect world, we'd be able to offer specific, targetted guidance for authors whose posts were likely to be shot down, before they ever showed up on the site, and without requiring as much up-front effort from our community."
Which is waaaaay before the classification line.