Blender would give Maya a real run for its money if it had an API.
Blender would really benefit from exposing its inner data structures in a way that lets people write high performance plugins.
I worked a bit on a "proper" API but there was zero interest from anyone so found something better to do with my time.
Not that I want to dismiss the benefit of plugins, but why not just work on getting the new features merged in instead if the Python API isn't sufficient for the task? Unless you have something the maintainers really don't want to deal with long-term there's little benefit to keeping your functionality out-of-tree.