That is kinda sad to hear. The approach should always be to go through the path of least resistance and smallest effect on the website. So for example, if a company has API that can be used instead of scraping their website, then it's always preferred to use the API. Same would go for the XML you mentioned.

It's bad that not everyone works like this; there are quite a lot of people who would rather brute-force a solution than think about it.