For your purposes scraping the user-visible site probably makes the most sense since in the end, their users' eyes are the target. I am typically doing one-off

For your purposes scraping the user-visible site probably makes the most sense since in the end, their users' eyes are the target. I am typically doing one-off scraping and for that, an undocumented but clean JSON api makes things so much easier, so I've grown to enjoy sites that are unnecessarily complex in their rendering.