[j13z]

I agree, the crawling / indexing problems you describe are definitely true for Linked Data. But there are still other use cases for semantic web technology.

> The use case many people have is that they want to use and API to get some particular bit of data out and that's it.

In theory, that's what SPARQL and SPARQL endpoints are for. Plus you get things like federated queries and an open data model (RDF), that allows to combine multiple data sources without "wrapping" schemas.

But well, this is kind of utopia and yes, I doubt it will ever be "a thing".