Yeah, this straight up echoes the arguments for VCRs… a while ago. Similarly, lockpicks. There exist legitimate and illegitimate uses of tools and it’s upon the operator to be response.
Again, IANAL and this is not an official statement, but I feel this accurately represents our perspective on this:
There’s a big difference between well-intended exploring with a tool (e.g.) and setting up automation.
We’re not going to get grumpy with people using meta with tools like this especially if they’re developing functionality or learning how to interact with the Discourse API. We’ll encourage it, as long as you’re not bulk-scraping data, incurring undue load, or degrading others’ experience.