I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their REST API has some sharp-edges, particularly around linked fields (columns), rate-limiting, and filtering records, I think it’s mostly solid and user-friendly.

Getting records from a table is as straightforward as making an API call to: `/{baseId}/{tableId}`. For getting the actual ids, there's a metadata API. The docs are also quite comprehensive. I’m curious as to where you have run into issues?