Enterprises spend 78% of their data collection budgets on data specialists. Not for elegant code. For the grinding work of unblocking target sites and reformatting datasets into usable structures.
Server maintenance takes 14%. Network security gets 5%. Software licensing claims 3%. The numbers tell a story most infrastructure pitches skip: web data collection at scale is a human labor problem wearing a technology costume.
Those specialists aren't optimizing algorithms. They're reverse-engineering authentication flows that changed overnight. Adapting to layout mutations. Cleaning malformed JSON that breaks parsers. The web resists automation at every turn, demanding judgment that machines can't yet replicate. Scale doesn't make this easier. It multiplies the edge cases until human expertise becomes the bottleneck.