Hi Zhimin Zhan, good article. Thanks for writing it. Hard to beat Selenium WebDriver robustness. A lot of people get scared with verbosity and years old myths about it.

Maintenance is hard to appreciate when you switch projects often and is not there to bear the results of your decisions.

Maintenance is one of the reason I created WebTau open source framework. It enables you to test across multiple layers, including Browser (using webdriver as behind the scene).
And one of the main goals of the framework was to considerably improve maintainability.

Core of the framework is written in Java. But you can write tests like script files using groovy and dedicated runner (command line). It has REPL mode to incrementally build your tests without full restart and tests produce very detailed report.

It would be so awesome if you could take a look at WebTau and share your thoughts.