From what I was told and this may be wrong, but CCP is adjusting the models which will impact bumping, it is however taking time.
CODE can be a lot of fun, however you also have to be careful in terms of player groups that get personal and seek to drive others out of the game, which they at times appear to do, some of the forum stuff can get quite personal, not that this bothers me of course, but some people are less hardy.
Messing with someones head is a perfectly valid strategy in competitive game play, but it has to be sustainable, all in all I think CCP do a damn fine job here, CODE is skillfully set up to be on that line. AG definitely have an impact on gankers, but understand that AG is made up of people who are having fun at the expense of gankers as well as some people who just want to get back at them and of course others that just want to resist them.
CODE does not always win, in fact their active numbers have dropped, but there are some very committed people in CODE.
I did try to gank a bumper once along with someone who had done it before and they had two Macherials and made it very difficult to get on them, we had three Talosās and they very skillfully moved around us to make it very difficult, in the end the gank fleet arrived and blew up the freighter. The victory of sorts was having two Macherials on that freighter, and that does help in understanding AG. It is easy to say, but not so easy to do, I have also tried counter bumping gankers, the only good way is bumping the freighter out of optimal, but they counter that with ship choice.
When you say who flies them solo, well a lot of people do, there was quite a lot of solo type players who do freighter hauling, weird I know, and those people are real risk takers, also there is often a logi man doing hisec hauling for their alliance and many alliances seem to just leave it to that one person with the obvious results. Really anyone who is an enemy of the Goons for example should have a dedicated anti ganking group to cover their hauling in hisec, but it is really an adhoc leave it to people who enjoy it sort of thing, which I find dumb, however I do know people who do it very well and hardly lose stuff.
One thing is that to me the Goons play this game at a different level to others, while CODE downplay their links to the Goons via Miniluv, I happen to think that the activities of Miniluv are very linked in to the trading and industrial play of the main Goon leadership in terms of the alliances wealth. I must say from an intellectual point of view it is great game play.
The webber is not complete safety, as they just need to suicide point the freighter to enable the bumper to get on it, they will do that.
o7