[bigiain]

I agree with both you and the post you're replying to.

One comment though, once you've past that "I can't do this without a real browser" line in the sand a few times, you end up with a collection of snippets and skills that moves that line much closer. Sure, I'll load the page and watch in browser tools to see what's in the html and what's coming back to XHR calls, but when I've got a directory full of previously used example code to fire up that uses Python/Selenium and deals with "boilerplate" parts, it's a much easier decision to jump that way than the first time I stared at the BeautifySoup documentation.

(When the only tool you have is a nailgun, every problem looks like a messiah...)