I wonder how much of iPhone assemblage hasn't been automated because workers in east asia doing the work earn so little it's not worth the effort to eliminate them?
It’s not just the cost of labor it’s also time to market for an expensive item etc. If manual assembly is 10x more expensive but it’s the difference between 1% and 0.1% of the sales price then other things can be the driving force.
Getting the next iPhone to market even 1 month sooner is extremely valuable, but they don’t manufacture the same phones for that long.
As to the bane of your existence, that actually sounds fun. You haven’t described it in enough detail to give meaningful recommendations, but your parser should be telling you what’s confusing it rather than crashing. You want to automate the process of automation.