It's hard to imagine any web scraping being described as "flawless". But there's a whole lot of room for "worked fine for my purposes."

I think that it's actually a pretty great example of a case where capturing data from HTML may not be best modeled as a parsing task. You might not need a whole parse tree just to match some pattern and grab an associated string. And skipping the parse may enable you to get useful data out of a file that technically can't be parsed due to syntactic errors. It's a fairly classic precision/recall tradeoff situation.

"I've never lost playing Russian Roulette"