[jrockway]

Probably not. The reason Paypal appears to hate its customers is because a not-insignificant number of them are trying to steal Paypal's money. A poor developer API, on the other hand, is probably due to bad programmers. I've worked with a lot of bad programmers at other jobs, and one thing I've noticed is that they're not very good at coming up with APIs. (Why does Paypal have bad programmers? I don't know: why don't you work for Paypal?)

Also, much of the complaining about Paypal seems to be in the form "I violated Paypal's ToS, and then they closed my account." Well, maybe you should read all those legal documents before entering into a business agreement?

[talkingquickly]

Very true re the not insignificant number trying to steal from them. PayPals business is as much fraud detection and avoidance as it is payment processing and they're very very good at the fraud detection bit.

The payment processing part seems to be great until it goes wrong but when it does they have the minimal resource possible devoted to dealing with it.