Correct. You can't get a contract without marketing/sales interaction with the customers. Customers at a high enough level to sign off on a payment with 7-9 z

Correct. You can't get a contract without marketing/sales interaction with the customers. Customers at a high enough level to sign off on a payment with 7-9 zeroes following the number are not generally programmers (or, if they were, they haven't been working at the coal face for decades): they're senior managers or civil servants. A GUI front end is a really amazing marketing tool for any piece of software insofar as GUIs are designed to expose all the internal configuration variables and controls in a visually appealing, or even intuitive, manner that is accessible to non-programmers. Like the folks signing the big checks. (Here's a second possibility: we know it's possible to use CAPTCHAs to crowdsource recognition of objects. Maybe they're trying to prevent export of a NN training system that uses unwitting mechanical turks for quality control?)