> Why would anyone want something outlawing automation in their TOS? Is their 'service' maximizing human effort and minimizing throughput?

It could be that they want to make usage painful to keep control of the data. Automated scraping/bulk downloads would be much easier to detect than TOS violations that occur after the data is downloaded.

For instance, I wish my county recorder's office forced people to manually retrieve property public records rather than providing them electronically. The extra cost would make it unfeasible for data brokers and people search websites to slurp up all the data for resale, while still allowing access for legitimate purposes.