These modules are very resource intensive and they become a bottleneck if you are scraping at high volume. I had to stop using these modules in one of my tools because of that reason. However, for smaller jobs they are awesome and much easier to use and understand.
jQuery requirement doesn't suit me because I am currently using YUI. Are you planning on making YUI version available? If not it would be nice to have a version with no framework dependencies.
Copy the nytimes article link. Go to google and search for the link. You should be able to click through to the article without the login screen. Hope it helps.
Lots of people that have been using YUI2 will appreciate the new YUI3 modular concept. While using YUI2 if you wanted to use a basic version of a YUI widget/component you would have to include the all of that widget library. Now that has that behavior has changed and most of the widgets/components/modules have been divided in several smaller chunks that make sense. For example, YUI3 IO has io-base, io-xhr, io-form, io-queue etc. You could load any one of them depending you needs. No need to load all of IO.
YUI3 has chaining similar the jquery (not as clean, I think) which makes is less verbose and pleasant to write JS.
It is easy to trivialize almost any company. E.g if sports is a waste to time so is facebook don't you think? So I guess facebook is a no go in your book? Apple - why even bother with apple product its just eye candy.
I could go on but I hope you get the idea. Word of advice - stop being so negative about stuff in life.
Ideas mean absolutely nothing. For every idea that someone comes up with I can find you 5 other guys that had thought about the same idea a while back. Its the people who can execute the idea that YC chooses to invest. Most of the YC startup founders have done some work in the past and they have show that they are resourceful and that they can execute. So don't read too much into the idea thing.