Wow, what a nightmare. In bioinformatics, scripting tasks analogous to that is a big part of the job description. You have to download and correlate all sorts of data; but instead of processing 250 patients, you need to process a million genes, or a hundred million short reads from a sequencer; and scripting is necessary.

Another big part of the job is continually patching the duct tape used to glue all the scripts together.