I'd love access to the Twitter API for research purposes for my writing, but I'm priced out for that purpose.

I can't prove it, but it feels like they only want big businesses researching their markets, and not people like me asking questions about Twitter itself - even though letting people do that would result in negligible additional traffic.

This might be controversial and I know people will say that they're a private company and can do what they want, but Twitter has positioned itself as society's de-facto official communication channel and I think the data on it should be a matter of public record at this point.

edit: Does anyone have experience with scraping tools and Twitter? Presumably it's hard to do.