In a particularly hard to scrape website, using some kind of bot protection that I just couldn't reliably get working (if anybody wants to know what that was exactly, I'll go and check it) I now have a small Intel NUC running with firefox that listens to a local server and uses Temper Monkey to perform commands. Works like a charm and I can actualy see what it's doing and where it's going wrong. (though it's not scalable, of course)

We use it for data-entry on a government website. A human would average around 10 minutes of clicking and typing, where the bot takes maybe 10 seconds. Last year we did 12000 entries. Good bot.