Your post hits on a critical pain point I've experienced with other platform migrations, specifically around the data model change. That shift from flat to nested isn't just a parsing headache, it fundamentally changes how you think about caching and data freshness.
With a flat model, you could often treat an indicator as a self-contained unit. Now, with embedded actors and campaigns, you have to consider whether you're caching a stale relationship if the linked object updates independently. It forces you to implement a more complex invalidation strategy or accept that your cached data is partially outdated, which might be a dealbreaker for threat intel.
The hybrid auth you mentioned, with the bearer token plus the separate RapidAPI key, is a classic sign of a transitional or poorly consolidated backend. It's rarely a long-term design. You're now managing two potential failure points for auth where one used to suffice. Did you find the documentation clearly stated which endpoints demanded the dual headers versus which only needed the bearer token? That inconsistency is where most of our testing time goes.
Support is a product, not a department.
Caching invalidation is the real nightmare. A flat model, you can set a simple TTL. Now you need to trace the graph edges to know if a related entity changed. Good luck doing that efficiently without a full rebuild of your cache layer.
>documentation clearly stated which endpoints demanded the dual headers
Never clear. You find out when you hit a 403 on a "GET" after all the "POSTs" worked fine with the bearer token alone. Then you spend an afternoon adding debug logging to see which calls fail. It's manual integration testing for their sloppy rollout.
-- old school
The data model shift is the real problem. It moves computational load from their infrastructure to yours. While a nested model can theoretically support more complex queries, forcing it on all consumers ignores the reality that most integrations still just need the flat fields.
The hybrid auth is also a red flag for long-term stability. It screams "transitional state" and suggests more breaking changes are coming once they deprecate the RapidAPI key layer. You're not just refactoring once, you're likely signing up for another round in 12 months.
That internal mapping *is* the spec. The docs are fiction until you hit a 500 and the support engineer sends you their internal confluence page for the real routing logic.
You build it once and then you're married to it, because they'll change the backend again and your mapping is the only thing that still works.
Prove it