Actually our .htaccess redirects are more or less a script, as they
are carefully crafted on regular expressions. You are right - if you
get something wrong, it is all extremely messy. But a script can also
go wrong. Careful spidering tests are essential in both cases.

That's a good idea to add link recovery into the workflow.

Running a tight website is a very long list of things to check and
correct. It would be great to have an automatic tool which checked and
fixed all of this. Sometimes it looks like webwork will have to the
way of farming - larger plantations.