Might be right, but… Sandbagging are the users, people like you and me! Cheating seems to be common all over the world, Zwift is no exemption.
An old Czech proverb says “lies have short legs”, meaning you won’t get far with a lie. But there is an addition - “… they can run damn fast with it!”
Most online games have a significant anti-cheating investment. The successful ones are quick to monitor and take action when a new method appears. There is currently no consequence of cheating, so more people do it. At least waste people’s time by making it harder to exploit.
Zwift doesn’t take action against a guy doing 600w for a few hours while mocking people in chat.
I can imagine it is hard for a company to do that. No matter how much I would like it.
It are still paying customers who do it, and if they get banned they are most likely leaving Zwift. And there is no guarantee that new users will join or come back because they are banning the cheaters.
So every ban is a loss for them. And I guess it always has to be checked manually if they were to perma ban them and that is time and money expensive also.
Other games manage to do it. Some even “outsource” it by having additional software running on the client PC.
It is great that the rights of the guy doing Tour de Zwift for 13.4km at 762w average are being so carefully considered. “ResPect”
Almost daily on Alpe du Zwift I see at least two riders with dubious power and or weight, although they don’t have the extraordinary fitness of the TDZ rider mentioned above.
No matter what you or I think about it, for Zwift it is still a paying customer.
I don’t see a point in racing until I hit cat A. First league winner still has less prestige than the bottom of the premier league
What if that cheating paying customer causes them to lose other paying customers?
Sure you keep one person, but if you lose three others?
But that I doubt it happening much. And if I have to believe some topics here on the forum we have thousands of cheaters. And that adds up.
Sure I would like Zwift to do more but a lot always forget that Zwift is a business and financial departments think different.
Tell me you’re not 56 without telling me you’re not 56. 
The giveaway was already in my forum name😉
This is why other games do it
Z Racing is dominated by several joke accounts. That’s probably why it’s hard for most to commit to bothering. You can’t dodge their timeslot now
I just crossed 700, am in a similar situation to OP, and Zwift is indeed useless to me now. Racing is fun, I can race in a specific hour a few days per week, and now there are no options.
Won’t everybody eventually get to over 700? As the best of each cat get promoted up and out, then the original bottom half becomes the top, and so on…
I vaguely recall suggesting in summer '23 with the original disaster zone racing system, that when racers get a pen promotion or demotion, their score should be adjusted to the middle of the pen racing range so their score will show how they are doing in their new pen once they get some race results.
But whether that would work under the current Racing Score?
To me, there are far bigger Racing Score fish to fry at the mo like…
Make seed score floor 100% rather than current 85%, that is allowing many racers to drop down a pen
Do an urgent change of position score changes after a race so the same position in a bigger field gives bigger changes, rather than currently giving relatively huge changes to small fields
Prevent position score changes for less than 5 finishers, currently there’s been suggestions you can get a massive score boost for being the only racer in a pen that finishes and signs up
Signups that dont take part in a race should have no affect on position score changes, unlike the current setup!
Yes, mathematically this is what will happen. People who get promoted, like I have, stop racing and ride things like Tour de Zwift as races. There were a bunch of former B racers who regularly raced the Tuesday 8:10 ZRace EST slot in the winter, and now we’re in the 650+ or 700+ ranges and can’t race what we used to any more. I see several of the names I used to race with now racing the TdZ rides as races, because we have no alternative option. But this means that the people we used to beat are now getting podiums and so they will get the podium bonus and before long also get promoted. Because its a one-ended score system (0 is an absolute end to the spectrum, but going over 700 puts you in limbo so you can’t effect the scores of the riders with lower score anymore) you will see a stretching of people into the 700+ who shouldn’t be there. Mathematically the only right thing to do is to let everyone have the same access to racing. I am a mathematician and a proponent of a racing score system, but one that makes mathematical sense. This one is absolutely garbage with the way they’ve set it up and has really screwed up the game. There are mathematically sound systems available, but they tried to roll their own and made one that will necessarily eventually promote everyone to limbo.