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You might consider looking at StacMan for inspiration, a C# client that deals with some of these questions. Off hand it does push everything through a "Manager" (called a Client in that code) and automatically enforces backoff and simultaneous request throttling. How many requests are OK to send simultaneously? While there is a strict cutoff... ...

The documentation for the response wrapper defines the backoff field as an integer, so you can expect it to come back in the first form. I don't believe there's any way to graciously test a backoff response short of actually angering the API (which I'd recommend against).