I posted a long message to a spinoff thread from this one, but almost no one has responded to it. Might be, of course, that you read it and decided it wasn't worth responding to, but I thought it might be that no one noticed it because of where it was posted. I spent a few hours drafting this note, and put in a few thoughts and suggestions near the end that I haven't seen here before, so I decided to re-post. If you've seen this message before, sorry for wasting your time and storage. The original post was in response to a thoughtful comment by Kent Archie.
Some applications are more amenable to automation than others.
I certainly also acknowledge that some tools are more effective than others. You type or mouse more slowly and more carefully. You recheck your result, re-running the test and seeing what it does. Granted that this only doubles or triples the amount of time it takes to run the test, but it adds up. References to good test management systems are always welcome.