Looks like a very nice integrated solution for data scientists and researchers. It's interesting to see the different shapes tools like this take, depending on their target users. I've been happy with node.js + cheerio[1] and it's simplistic jquery-like API:

    request 'http://website.com/list_of_stories.html', (err, body) ->
        $ = cheerio.load(body)
        callback $('#comments li a.commenter-name').map(cheerio::text)

Plus if you need to handle javascript/ajax, just replace that with jsdom/chimera with minor changes.

[1] http://npmjs.org/package/cheerio