More humans could have staved the inevitable at least until the end of WotLK -- that much I agree with. But I doubt Blizzard is all-too-jazzed to hire people whose sole job description is "guy who watches bots." That's a terrible waste of human labor. They'd likely have them working multiple things at once (answering other tickets, responding to e-mails, etc) and the more that their job description strays from the oh-so-important task of ensuring people aren't bots, the less effective such a position becomes.
There are ways to combat botting -- but outside of the traditional methods that Blizzard is assuredly already employing, I think we'd be talking about kernel-level changes to the game. This is would have had to have been done before they launched Vanilla Classic. They were more concerned with getting the product released than they were preventing bots. They also could have launched it with the token already there but they already explained why they didn't in the post. The sad reality is that the token in a world where botting is possible is an inevitability.