And Amazon sellers API (Amazon MWS). Rarely seen such an inconsistent mess of often poorly documented SOAP-ish calls, that so many external partners base their livelyhood on.
Some APIs you can choose to use. Other APIs you have to use. The ones you have to use tend to not care much about the developer experience... Because why should they? No one's going to avoid Amazon because their API was annoying. People need to make money.
This actually explains a lot of other things. Like the DMV.
The API is not not SOAPish, it just uses XML. They probably choose it so that they can use XML Schema to check incoming data (which is exactly the right decision here).
