Looking forward to this.

It can. But not by much more than a few percent, and your average score is still much better with it than without it. And I highly suspect that we'll soon see a generation of bots with bullet defenses intertwined with their movements much more than they currently are.

I actually feel a bit jealous about the current adding-bullet-shielding-to-megabots trend. A while ago I noticed GeomancyBS getting ~99% against Nene and other ridiculously high scores, and I wondered why other high-end bots weren't shielding. It was going to be my secret weapon, but now I guess I'll just have to find something else. :(