Don't get me wrong about points, points do matter just like you stated -- without points there would probably be no teams and without teams there'd quite possibly be no amdusers.com. Points are important and makes a project competitive between the members and that can only be a good thing for the 'whatever' project. I am certainly not against points and am certainly not against gaining as many points as I can by O/Cing my systems and letting them crunch 24/7/365.
EDIT : Why am I crunching Tanpaku at the moment? - simply to help the team gain the #1 points position!!!
My post was really around why I do these projects.
Regarding cheating - I strongly disagree that optimized libraries such as Crunch3r's old optimized code, which is just a better design, should be labeled cheating I would say cheating is when someone friggs with their benchmarking figures so much so that they don't actually benefit the project whatsoever and are just in it for the points - as an example the guy who gained 775,040,862,421.17 credits for one 11 minute WU in HashClash that time, now that's cheating!