[Chris is me]

There's no way to prevent this strategy while still preserving the right to decline.

That said, I haven't the slightest of problems with it. It makes eliminations far more interesting every single time it happens. It provides the top seeds with an important additional incentive that compensates for the disadvantage given to them by the serpentine draft. Perhaps the only thing that bothers me about it is that it's a little awkward.

If you've seeded in the top 8, you should have the right to form your own alliance. Imagine if this wasn't the case. Imagine 6-7 FIRST teams openly lying to the first seed about the state of their robot to try and avoid getting picked. Imagine the off-field deals this would incentivise ("if you don't pick us, we won't pick team xxx that you want on the back half of the draft"). Even more teams would more actively hope to not be on an alliance with someone.

I mean, I guess scorched earth should be avoided, in the sense that we shouldn't have a seeding system and number of qual matches that commonly allows carried teams to seed first / second / third. However, to at least some small extent this is unavoidable. Even in 2010 there were teams with better schedules than others (and, as good at ranking teams as it was, not a ton of people want to go back to 2010 for some reason).

It's also worth noting that not all declines are because the chosen team thinks the top seed sucks or whatever. The serpentine allows for better alliances at lower seeds sometimes. In addition, almost every decline in Canada last year was done in order to play at a seed that faces #1 in the finals, in order to earn wild card slots.