Many years ago I was working on a complex screen scraper (the good kind) app and every site we scraped was ~1000 lines of error prone code, plus all the usual problems of sites changing randomly under us and the need to respond quickly. They wanted to scale up to scrape dozens of sites and we weren't given the resources so I came up with a little xpath like language "//content-area/table/tbody/@foreach/tr/@get-value" or something like that, after that the largest scraper was a dozen lines of code.

I think it came down on the right side of reducing complexity rather than creating more but I was let go shortly after for the heinous crime of not being at my desk at 9am.