Biggest downside was it's inability to see (literally), getting lists of interact-able game objects, NPCs, etc was fine when it decided to do something that didn't require any real-time input. Sailing, or anything that required it to react to what's on screen was pretty much impossible without more tooling to manage the reacting part for it (e.g. tool to navigate automatically to some location).
The only thing is you would need a description of the worlmap on each tick (i.e. where npcs are, where objects are, where players are)
I still have some parts of the old Rei-net forum archived on an external somewhere.
SirPugger's youtube channel has loads of videos monitoring various bot farms.