Your premise that the web is somehow less effective because you can't scrape data from pages easily doesn't make much sense to me. Have you taken a look recent

Your premise that the web is somehow less effective because you can't scrape data from pages easily doesn't make much sense to me. Have you taken a look recently at the plethora of web APIs for just about every purpose? The modern way of collecting machine-friendly data from a server is through APIs and semantic content (RDFa, microformats, etc.). Not through HTML / CSS / Javascript formatted pages which are made primarily for human consumption.