They're relatively low level APIs. Great if you're a C developer, but for most things you'd do in python just calling the command line probably does make more sense.

As someone that used these APIs in C, they were not very well-documented nor intuitive, and oftentimes segfaulted when you messed up, instead of returning errors—I suppose the validation checks sacrifice performance for correctness, which is undesirable. Either way, dealing with this is not fun. Such is the life of a C developer, I suppose....

It could even make sense in C. In some circumstances, I wouldn’t feel bad for cutting that corner.