Maybe it's not a "smells like Java" but from Google's perspective, they treat every api method with equal weight because so many people use different parts of i

Maybe it's not a "smells like Java" but from Google's perspective, they treat every api method with equal weight because so many people use different parts of it. GMaps is trying to solve the simple use cases where the other 80% of the api methods are unnecessary. If you need something specific and you're building something beyond the typical google maps customer, then you'll have to use the google standard apis, but most people would be happy to use something simpler.