I would like to see a new API call or an update to the existing view metadata call, that lists which line items are "shown" in a saved view.
The only way to get this information now is to read the view and parse the header line.
When using the API to build an integration, pulling the metadata of an object before pulling the data from that object is a common practice. This is often done to dynamically create the target in which that data will be loaded.