Now heres a thought.

How dumb do you think the dev's think we are?

I am pretty sure they know we are smart.
Because the simplest solution to making HP statues easy is something some already do and something we do for many other reasons.
The 2 most powerful can just step down from 1 and 2 and let weaker players take those spots.

Now if people are doing that how can that be called an exploit? I dont think that can be called an exploit. SO if that is not an exploit, figuring out the timing of Hp statue captures and making your formation be 1 hero is not exploiting anything either, because your accomplishing the same thing just in a different way.

I am pretty sure the devs have kept quiet on this issue because they did not want to make it easy to manipulate HP statues, but knew it would happen eventually. And in the mean time it would give them time to come up with different code to make manipulating HP statues harder or impossible.

Once again I think this will be like last hit in banish. Something unintended but not an exploit nor anything anyone will get punished for later.