Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant by "functional" interface. But if I said maybe the format implemented by the patch is maybe too close to how we store the statistics, then this has exactly the same issue. And it has other issues too, I think - it breaks down the stats into multiple function calls, so ensuring the sanity/correctness of whole sets of statistics gets much harder, I think.
Export functions was my original plan, for simplicity, maintenance, etc, but it seemed like I'd be adding quite a few functions, so the one view made more sense for an initial version. Also, I knew that pg_dump or some other stats exporter would have to inline the guts of those functions into queries for older versions, and adapting a view definition seemed more straightforward for the reader than function definitions.