Er, all 3 were 'snipes', as most people understand the term here: 'sniping' just means bidding towards the very end. ('proxy bidding' is what ebay does for you, upping your disclosed bid towards your maximum as subsequent bids come in; that's not happened there.) The third one that you say was 'definitely a snipe'--I assume you refer to the Snow White item--was a snipe no more nor less than the other 2. And Snow White could have been either manual or automatic, like the others.
Yeah you've got a point about AS bidding early--there's a lot of undesirable flex in the exact timing. In your 3 auctions, 2 snipes seem to have been placed 14 and 29 seconds before close. Poor, but could be worse. Sometimes snipes go in early by longer, upwards of a minute (maybe once in 10 snipes, in my own experience), or several minutes, or reportedly even hours, which ticks off people no end. I get the sense there's a Taoist school on this (accept it, be at one with AS), I'd side with the Reformist school (why in hell can't they do better).