I'm sorry you just invested a lot of time in scraping. I know from experience what a pain that is. We said several times that the API was coming, and I've made it clear to anyone who asked, but there's just no way to reach everybody. All: in the future, please get answers to questions like this by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Re write access and logged-in access, if that turns out to be how people want to use the API, that's the direction we'll go. But we think it's important to launch an initial release and develop it based on feedback. There are many other use cases for this data besides building a full-featured client: analyzing history, providing notifications, and so on. It will be fascinating to see what people build!