I'm all back to how it functioned on 3.4. We were taking advantage of Mattermost not closing the connection after a period of time so I had to add a thread to ping the websocket every 30 seconds to resolve my connection is already closed issue.
I didn't see an easy way to pull that data without reading the output of the api above last month. We're building an automated access request system to get access to multiple external systems so making sure the correct user name and email are being sent across is important. Now that it's back in a usable state with the 3.5 api I should be able to experiment some more and see if those other requests can do it a little cleaner.
Thanks for the heads up on the work you are doing for making it easier for devs to prepare for major changes. That is was a little frustrating until I updated to 3.5.x