Just imagine trying to do this without ANY scripts. At all. The only way to find hits is to manually search through Mturk. The only way to pick up a hit is to manually click on it and accept it. The only way to figure out if a HIT is worth doing is to do it.
Then add about 200 percent more HITs that were COMPLETE scams. Either the requester rejected your work, or they rejected your work and also it was a phishing scam, so they stole your credit card information as well.
There were no forums to communicate with other workers.
It's not even just the scripts, it's the entire community. It's really well developed now, but there was a period of time where it was just you and your computer and scams for days. This was before 6 bucks an hour was the "standard", so most people were paying less than that by a wide margin.
Turking used to be way, way harder, and also, a gigantic crap shoot in terms of whether you would get paid at all.