I'm impatient.. don't like waiting... How do you get the data from hashes returned by the API?

I can't even tell what class the characters are i'm pulling back... why this information has to be hashed but other bits of info don't is beyond my understanding. Why not just return 'className': 'Warlock'... or hell even a numbering scheme like 1=Titan, 2=Warlock, 3=Hunter would be more useful to me. This is the same case with inventory items and gear... it's all hashes. Maybe this is just a dumb noob question.. I dunno.. I just think if I were to design a system like this, hashes wouldn't make any sense unless I'm trying to purposefully obscure the data for some security reason.. Does it make their system faster somehow? What's the purpose? Are the items and classes and such in a separate table somewhere that I don't know about and these things are just relational to it? If so where is it and how do I access it? I keep on waiting for some useful documentation... but alas, as the title to this post eludes.. I'm not very patient about it...