Hi @jayb, welcome to the forum!
Also, thanks for your feedback. We have a bot in the examples directory that uses rules only. Maybe this helps?
Concerning your question about rules and forms: note that forms always take precidence and rules get ignored as long as the form is running. If you want to handle the situation where the user wants to stop filling the form and talk to a human, you must have the form reject the evaluation, as is explained here.