no unfortunately, when you automate someone elses site, you are doing something they didnt intend or design for, so you get lots of cases where data you want doesn't have any easy way to access it other than some raw parsing. The downside is that when the page changes at all, it could break your parsing logic. However the same is true if they change something like an elements id value, which is generally considered the "easy way" to get data from a page.

As far as your question about timing, you need to use the documentcompleted event of the browser to do subsequent navigations and operations. This is the event that fires when a page fully loads into the browser and has been rendered. If you try to do ANYTHING to a webpage before this event fires, you will likely end up with an error sooner or later, because the page has not fully loaded.

So then people always ask the same question "well documentcompleted is only 1 event, and I need to do something different based on what page is actually loading", and the answer to that is you need to evaluate the browsers current URL when this event occurs, and that tells you which page just loaded, and you can take appropriate action from there.

Again, the process of manipulating webpages is a tricky one, and some sites are way easier than others. However I have done a few consulting projects and personal projects for web automation, and so far there was not a site I couldn't automate. Some projects require more maintenance than others, but that is just how it goes.