Having interfaced with the Facebook API when FQL and FBML were all the rage I'm left scratching my head at your comment.
> Actually the Facebook API has been pretty impressive functionality-wise, over the years.
What's your definition of functionality? To serve a purpose well, or the range of operations supported? In my experience neither of those things has been true of the Facebook API (granted I haven't touched it in the last ~2 years). "How much you can do" has actually been rather limited throughout the life of the API, and what it did do it didn't do very well. I have not-so-fond memories of dealing with orphaned state data that left the app I was working on irreversibly broken for the user.
Saying that the documentation never kept up is being too kind. The documentation was never in a complete form to begin with. I had to write a large amount of 'discovery' code just to tease out how much of the API really worked. The worst part was not being able to trust the code Facebook themselves shipped to interface with their own APIs. I had to patch the PHP library they provided just to get it to work at all.
> Now, however, Facebook has hit an inflection point in growth
Again, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but if you're implying that they're now so big that they've got to start taking shit seriously I think you're again being to kind. Smaller startups (including many in the YC crowd) do a better job with less money and employees, and with much smaller user bases. Facebook dicks around with their APIs without concern for developers because they can. The growth rate and size of the user base is the problem, not the reason they need to clean up their act. Besides, Facebook has been huge for a long, long time now. Their culture clearly doesn't value outside input or concerns.
> I believe Facebook has found the core of what it is
You sound like a Facebook PR person, but I'll humor you. Let's say they have found their core. It certainly isn't a genuine respect for their users (consumers or developers). The easiest way to evaluate the company (for me) is to take away the popularity aspect and look at two things: the valuation and what they're actually making/producing/creating (insert favorite verb for what companies "do"). At 50+ billion dollars I see a company that makes a lot of noise about innovation, but does very little that is different than what it did when it launched in 2004 (at scale, granted). If that beginning kernel of "innovation" (which is arguably no different than MySpace with better design) justifies said valuation then so be it, but many other social networks with roughly equivalent features have come and gone. It doesn't seem clear what "core" they were searching for, or what (if anything) they found. Facebook has the network effect on its side and that's about it.
The hype is almost too much to watch sometimes. The media loves (needs) attention, and Facebook has a lot of it concentrated on its site. The media wants a piece, as I can vouch for having worked with a lot of ex-newspaper types, thus fueling the cycle. The reality is that the loyalty of people's attention is grossly over-estimated, and so is the value of that Facebook "does".
I'll paraphrase a thread I saw a while back here on HN. It depresses me that some of the best minds of my generation are working on how to make more people look at ads.
Edit: Minor point clarification.