is this the intended function?   surely I'm not the only one who's run into this.  If this is only a problem in my mind, I'd appreciate someone pointing it out.
Currently the API is a mess to try and use.  BTS1 API was bad but BTS2 is actually worse.  To get the information I need anywhere else It generally takes 1 API call.  With BitShares it takes 3 or 4.   Not to mention all these special cases where sometimes its presented one way and other times another.  What should take 50 lines of code ends up taking 200.