I guess we have a different point of view, because I think the people who are lazy will always lose out to the people who work hard, especially in the IM game. If you're busting your balls to find article directories, then you are probably taking the time to write quality spun articles, making sure you are using the correct categories, shooting for that high submit percentage. Sure it's nice to have thousands of directories to submit to, but look at how many threads pop-up here about people having trouble submitting to them using AMR.
So really the ones you need to worry about are your niche competitors who work just as hard as you, or harder. They aren't going to solely rely on articles for back links. If they are using AMR too then you can call it even.
I think in the grand scheme of things, this is a small issue. I could see if we were talking about ScrapeBox. If that program shared our lists then there would be concern, because those blogs we post on can easily be diluted losing their backlink power.