Not updating a website people use regularly is not a bad thing - people are used to the UI, and changing shit only ruins the experience when people need to re-learn how to use the damn thing.

Also, it's not like MAL is "not updated", since it constantly has new content added - much of it user contributed, but those contributions get locked up behind a server, and we don't have access to it except through the website itself.

I don't suppose you would be offering the ability to query data, which will inevitably be user-contributed?