Mutating bots very often do much better than their equivalent non-mutating brethern in internet mode. This happens often enough and consistantly enough that I have been forced to modify my position that hand authorred bots represent a steep, otherwise unreachable pinicale in the evolutionary landscape and that they must devolve before they can evolve (this is sloppy terminology, but you get my drift).
The thing I've come to realize is that the morphospace is not only vast but vastly multidimensional. Thinking about it as a 3D space with peaks and valleys is misleading. Hand authorred bots may represent a steep pinicale in many evolutionary dimensions, meaning that a single mutation in that direction breaks them and lowers their fitness to such an extent that they cannot compete, but there are so many dimensions, so many different genotypes adjacent to a given genotype in the space of all possible genotypes, that even the most fragile hand authorred bot can still increase it's fitness via a mutation in at least some directions.