Yeah, prize disbursements were handled terribly. My team won BitPay's prize at AngelHack SF, contacted them repeatedly, and were told to wait until all AngelHacks were over before anything would be done. Months and months later it arrived this week. We actually avoided BitPay intentionally at a couple hackathons after since no one was sure if they were just scammers or not.

That said, I had no problem with their API. They had an easy web checkout link that could be generated that worked fine in an Android WebView for my first implementation. Later at AngelHack SV I used their PHP API to generate invoices for specific prices for goods dynamically and was then still able to send people to their site to finish checkout and get redirected when it completed.

Didn't really see any missing documentation and their site worked fine, responding quite quickly when money was sent to the barcode it showed or the link that could start a wallet app on Android, and their PHP sample code worked trivially. Who knows, maybe they've improved the docs and samples since you used it, though. Or you were trying to hack bitcore, which is a completely different level of difficulty.