Why it is so damn hard to get approved for Meta Graph API

As a former maintainer of a significant portion of Meta's Graph API, I anticipated that integrating Meta's official API into our product would be straightforward. However, the reality was far from it.

It took us an astounding 14 attempts and almost 3 months to pass the API App Review. For context, our API use case is fairly standard. All we require is to fetch Instagram comments on our users' own posts – as simple as that.

I felt the reviewers didn't not understand ANYTHING about Graph API itself. They're basically following a prefixed script to reject any applications that are NOT demonstrating a short list of predefined behaviors. For example, fetching IG comments requires `pages_show_list` permission per official API doc but our app has absolutely nothing to do with FB pages. Still, they wanted us to prove we have a valid use case for FB pages to be approved.

Can anyone relate to this nightmare?