I was using the API for an IRC updater but went the route of scraping/GET/POST sockets for the simple reason I was using up the 100 API allowance on busy days in IRC as everytime someone changed topic or did !quote or whatever was linked to the bot made a call. Then the n00bs say hey what's that do? They have a play around and before you know it you're APId out!

I agree the API is cleaner and add also it's a fair bit faster(perhaps obviously) it just wasn't handy for 'that' particular bot.