[basseq]

It sounds to me like you're arguing less for programming and more for a) a basic algorithms class, b) an understanding of technology applicability to real-world problems, and c) the need for better tools to automate daily tasks.

You have to be a pretty good programmer to write a multi-page scraping script fast enough that it beats the tradeoff of just doing it by hand. Or you need to solve the problem another way. I guess that's what I'm getting at... the problems you're highlighting are real, but I don't think the solution is "learning about programming."