Clarifications on the front_matter plugin

[Kraballa]

Hi I'm looking for some clarifications on the front_matter plugin since I'm not all that deep into python.

1. as far as I can tell all it does is parse front matter as a token
2. the only way of accessing the data I've found is writing a custom render rule that accepts the token and then send that back to wherever you need it. while this isn't all that bad it still feels very clunky but more importantly undocumented. python-markdown for comparison simply allows you to retrieve the data as a dictionary from the markdown object after rendering something. even the js implementation of frontmatter accepts a callback function
3. it doesn't actually parse any front matter, as in, it doesn't check that it actually is a collection of key-value pairs. so it almost does nothing? The only use case without tinkering around yourself seems to be to remove it from the document.