Except it's very useful to be able to import the many many forms for the various sources of income automatically. If you're just a w2 and a 1099-int then yes, obviously it's not hard to file taxes manually.
Those features are really only viable at the scale of large commercial tax software, not the efforts described in the submitted post.
PDFs aren't exactly used in a standardized way, so trying to make this work for even a fraction of the numerous tax form issuers requires a lot of work, and a lot of ongoing maintenance. You'll need to prioritize the actual tax forms, and annual updates to those first.
I used TurboTax online last year and was pretty happy with it's ability to import 1099 data from several companies I use like vanguard and Ameritrade. So the PDFs aren't standardized but many providers have apis to pull the data. In fact, they may be using something like Plaid that consolidates all the APIs into one.
Well, TurboTax happens to be the most widely used large commercial tax software, and the brokers you mentioned are also quite large and popular. Whatever integration has been done is almost certainly proprietary and not freely reusable.
Hypothetically, even if an API existed, building the integration in your own app also costs FTE hours that are likely drawn away to higher priority tasks.
Sure, but this just means open source tax software isn’t viable. TurboTax integrates with most financial services Americans use, to compete with them this functionality has to be matched somehow.
