As an aside, “following such admonitions when they are made by an important data-provider” is not entirely altruistic:   in practice, it is a very important survival strategy.   When you design and build a business system that is intended to obtain information from a third-party data source, you obviously (should...) be designing that system to be durable.   You want to “do it right the first time such that you never have to re-visit it again,” not merely “to design an oh-so lokkit-me I’m-so-gosh-darned clever” ... hack.   You do not want to show up to work one day to find that the data provider made some slight change to their web-page last night and now thirteen hours (and counting) of vital production activity is scroo’d up with y-o-u-r asterisk-is-grass name on it.   Therefore, if a provider tells you the right way to do something, do it.

(Trust me on this one ....)