I'm moving away from browser bots, I need suggestions.

You will run into JS in the future, something that you will have to deal with. In my methodology and setup I have PHP organizing and managing the entire program whiles I route all of the posting data and retrieval tasks through shell execution, to Ruby, through watir, and have the results returned. I have PHP dissect and make all of the decisions (conditions) and return the variables again through shell execution and have ruby execute the important tasks. The reason I do this is because PHP isn't so good with unit testing and javascript, two important things (JS being a mainstream technology). You can not entirely do away with interacting with the browser, especially if you want to expend the usefulness of your programs.

I would also like to mention that I only work with CLI. I don't do GUI at all, no time for that foolishness.

You can just execute the JS locally without needing WebBrowser..