In fact, it takes (some) manpower, even if that’s actually really limited but still and I think as well that listing methods in a website does not make sense for quite some years already anymore.
We always missed a way to add comments which could have made me think about it another way. In fact, just listing methods and parameters together with some scarce comment is of no use nowadays with PhpStorm and other similar IDE but having sample code together with important methods could be of some use. But that’s past now, it wouldn’t make sense to introduce that in current situation.
Since I’m using a decent IDE (for ~6 years now) I never had the urge to consult api.typo3.org, but I was rather nagged by it when I googled for some internal TYPO3 stuff.
Even text editors with additional plugins are able to build an “API tree”, which renders api.typo3.org obsolete, IMO.
Our aim for typo3.org is, that we want to provide a users view to our product. Show features and provide a quick way, on how to use them (Links to docu, videos, show example pictures of the feature). So we need a compact feature overview and for each feature a detailed page with further informations.
The only thing where I used this service was to get inspiriation, which (maybe alternate) methods are available.
Maybe the documentation can be improved in this regard.
It once felt like a promising possibility to use Sphinx crossreferencing to create documentation links to api.docs.org. Unfortunately those links were outdated very soon.
I’ve used the API to show others which method to use. But nowadays we have Github with is much greater as you have all source code tagged for each version which fits much better.
Even if you don’t use an IDE you have enough possibilities to get what you need, e.g. using ctags, universal ctags and further implementations.
As Martin wrote, I’ve already used api.typo3.org in my sphinx projects. But that is not very helpful and should be no issue.