frankly, it sounds like she could have simply taken the initiative and wrote the script on her own time. seems like she could have simply done it over a weekend, and it would have been worth it if she truly felt that it would save her an hour per week.
That might be true - but she should do it only to prove that those kind of investments are worth it, and to gain trust from her boss/team.
I think programmers should be paid to not only do the crappy grunt-work, but also for automating it away, even though there will sometimes be cases where it turned out not to be worth it. To me, the automating is part of the job.
And sure, I remember when I used to think I could rewrite entire applications in a few hours the "right way", but that was pure inexperience on my part. For a junior dev, they might want to run it by someone more experienced, but otherwise, these kind of tangents can turn out to be some of the most valuable time spent on a project.
