>Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.
That's the messed up part. I guess the question is, does robots.txt override that or not? If it does, fine. If not, all you need to do is make a few "google ignores robots.txt" posts and the problem solves itself.
Googlebot doesn't use the crawl delay line in robots.txt if that's what you're asking. I guess theoretically it's because you can normally change it in the webmasters interface.
It's not really ignoring robots.txt either, as crawl delay is not an 'official' setting
That's the messed up part. I guess the question is, does robots.txt override that or not? If it does, fine. If not, all you need to do is make a few "google ignores robots.txt" posts and the problem solves itself.