If you think about it, I bet what you actually hate are the folks who just downloaded the cheat and used it, without knowing anything about it. But what if everyone wrote their own exploit? Eventually every game would devolve into Core Wars, but this would be kind of cool.
If everyone did write their own exploit, I'd still have hated it. Cheating in those kind of games really does ruin the game for everyone else. Enabling those people to do what they did was nearly as bad IMO.
I competed in a couple of the early CAL seasons legitimately (main and then invite). Most of us never condoned cheating in league play or even in most public servers. That's the part where you're ruining games for other people. There were, at one point, quite a few servers dedicated to cheating, however, and even a competitive scene to see who could make the best cheats.
But leagues actually made things more interesting. They started creating their own anti-cheats and those were just new shiny toys to break as well. It's quite satisfying to defeat them, even if the goal isn't to cheat in a league.
The worst cheaters seemed to be the guys that played in the [inter]national competitions. They would cheat, say "online doesn't matter, LAN noob", and ruin the game for everyone.
But like I said, I can see the appeal of creating the cheats at least. My first introduction to real programming was creating a mIRC script that would login and "vote" on a popular local website where there was a 15 minute delay between votes - where the developer kept changing forms and URLs to stop my script from working.