It's still being done - see e.g. http://www.muddywatersresearch.com - and there's no reason an outfit like that couldn't publish a report as Anonymous...
But why mess with the selectors by hand? http://search.cpan.org/~vbar/HTML-ListScraper-0.05/ can discover the structure automatically (well, sometimes :-) - some pages just aren't regular enough, but it does work on HN, for example)...
A few people (including me :-) ) wrote SQL parsers in ANTLR. I'm quite satisfied with the result and never heard anyone to complain ANTLR wasn't suitable for the task...
Application programmer - C++ ( https://github.com/vbar/ ), Perl ( http://search.cpan.org/~vbar/ ), Python ( https://scraperwiki.com/profiles/vbar/ ), C#, Java. Full CV at http://www.mangrove.cz/ .