One interesting thing that I noticed about the trending edits API is that it was fairly useful in identifying articles that were under attack by vandals or experiencing an edit war. A lot of times a vandal will just sit on an article and keep reverting back to the vandalized version until an admin shows up, which can sometimes take a while. If you tweak the parameters passed to the API, you can almost get it to show nothing but edit wars (high number of edits, low number of editors).
This makes me think that this API is actually useful, it's just targeted to the wrong use case. If we built something similar, but that just looked for high numbers of revert/undos (rather than edits), and combined it with something like Jon Robson's trending edits user script (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/Gadget-trending-edits.js), we could create a really powerful tool for Wikipedia administrators to identify problems without having to wait for them to be reported at AN/I or AIV.