The plugin landscape for iClone is pretty ugly, but it's not likely to get worse given where it's at. It will likely remain the same or get better (which I wouldn't hold my breadth for). As you have seen, once you go past the pretty website marketing slides promoting the open plugin system and how great it is, the rest of the experience drops to the level of that page they link to. It's actually an apt link, because it says most of what you need to know.
What you really want as a new developer coming in to check this out, beyond being pointed to page that makes you think something is broken or abandoned or backed by geocities webservers that no longer exist, is some simple and direct documentation around their python environment, how it works, what are versions and limititations, how might you hook an IDE or something more than Notepad into it, and then some nice examples to get started. They give you some examples at least, so at least you have the body of the car even if the wheels are absent. I think some brave soul on the internet somewhere has put up some of those details, I know I found it once while on a journey through this wasteland, not sure I could find it again.
You can see they thought or planned or hoped the python API would be a bigger thing. They talk about rapid relesases with more experiemental stuff, with some of the addiions dropping or staying or changing, with other parts of the API being more stable. There is a fair amount of talk. It quickly dies down, and none of it seemed to be become relevant.
The documentation they do have is not top notch. It's a slog, and you will find plenty of things that leave you scatching your head, not least of which are the methods that are documented for a number of paramaters that doesn't match the example right there in the same documenation. Required parameters. Anyway, it's not written to try and be helpful or very useful for someone trying to get into iClone developement. You can throw an AI at it, and it will tell you as nothing goes into much detail about anything, it can make some guesses, but there is not enough there to allow you to understand things beyond that.
So the API itself is kind of dense, not in terms of what it offers in capabilities, but more understandibility, and the documenation is poor, and the updates and support and whatnot is poor, and the communication after the initial burst is very poor, and unless they pull it out, thats likely how things will remain.
And people work it out, and they write some plugins. So you could to. My main point is, I wouldnt take the state of things as bad omens for where things are going. Thats been the state things and will probably be the state of things. So if your willing to work through it, I think your good. And if not, yeah, there are better pluin system to learn. Blender? Not the best in the world, but light years beyond this. Most any of them are.
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bad_character