I'm facing issues with Minion for a long time, such as long startup time, crashes or it refusing to find my game addon directories even if I navigate manually to the desired directory. Additionally I'm unhappy with the dependency on Java.
Is there any chance to get access to the used API (I'd even pay for access) so we would be able to write a minion alternative in C?
This has been asked before, and they've said no. Apparently the plan is to make minion 4 and once that's released, they plan to make it open source, though the API will remain only usable by Minion. You could however send a PM to dolby to ask if there's some way you can contribute to minion.