Every HN thread is full of people who think webmasters should just pay through the nose to handle bot traffic to preserve the sacred rights of turbonerds to visit their website using Lynx on their toaster.

I should think that there should be a better way (e.g. port knocking, instructions for manually correcting the URL that cannot easily be automated, additionally supporting alternative protocols, etc).

Sounds great. Link us to your project?

It actually is. And to think it's not, means you don't understand what the benefit is.

Just because you've never been in a situation to care about the benefit they are offering, does not mean it's not valuable.

And the position "you need a good excuse to have overly specific software" is extremely strange.