As you have learned, RPA is mostly screen scraping, macros, and as another person referred to it below "Rube Goldberg machines" that break when UIs change. For all of these reasons above (the need for automation and the limitations of RPA), we started Soroco. Like you said (and we agree) you can't build serious automation without real development.
We take a fundamentally different approach which is to build a platform/SDK for automation that provides a significant amount of reliability on top of a number of unreliable automation layers. There is no other way to automate Windows applications or Java applications than through either A) Screen scraping, or B) Their accessibility layers (e.g., Windows UIA). The problem is that BOTH are extremely unreliable. For web, that equivalent is Selenium (at least as the primary layer).
As another commenter mentioned below, a "watered down version of Selenium" is exactly what is NOT needed -- nor are Windows UIA or other accessibility layers great. They are all extremely unreliable. When something like Selenium fails to find an element, what do you do? Halt your business critical process?
All of these frameworks were never built to handle business critical processes, they were mainly built for application testing. The RPA industry has basically tried to leverage them and pretend they are enterprise ready by hiding them behind flow chart builders. They are NOT enterprise ready.
To draw an analogy, it's like having the Internet and IP, which do NOT provide or guarantee reliability. You need the equivalent of TCP and reliability layers.
At Soroco, we have dealt with all of this and have put a tremendous amount of effort into building reliability layers on these unreliable systems, along with security, scalability, and machine learning. We construct automation systems using a full programming language (Python) and have built flow control layers and reliability on top of it. Sort of like an automation SDK for Python with a full IDE. We have lots of supporting microservices for storing credentials securely, storing information scalably, and deploying. We've even open sourced how we encrypt Python (https://blog.soroco.com/)
What does "cognitive" mean in this field? At Soroco, we don't pretend automation systems can "self heal" or "self construct" -- that's just silly. For Soroco, cognitive means that if you had your automation system do the same thing over and over (e.g., during User Acceptance Testing)... what can it learn about the distribution of inputs or outputs to flag anomalous behavior? We also apply Machine Learning and Computer Vision to specific use cases to make them achieve what is not possible through a laundry list of conditionals. For example, ML/NLP to classify intents of text and to do things like binary or multi-class classification.
There's a lot of noise in the RPA space. I'd be happy to share more with you if you want to reach out directly to me: george@soroco.com or gnychis@gmail.com