Dropbox is vile and I want no part of it in my life.

However,

one particular tool I work with has no way of getting its data to me except via Dropbox, and I can't fix that.

I have one of those anonymous "share" links for the folder in which my data materializes (the "dropbox.com/sh/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYYYYYYY_ZZZZZZZZZZ" kind) and I have a script that has been just scraping the HTML and mirroring the files directly. It's slow and wasteful and irritating but it had been working for 5+ years... except recently the Dropbox web pages have begun shitting the bed, and half the time when I load and parse them, they return different, unparsable data. Maybe these are intermittent backend errors, or maybe they've changed their Javascript that be even more obscure and only some proxies have caught up to the new, more useless way. I dunno, I can't tell.

So I tried doing it the "official" way and creating and "app" and generating an OAuth token and using the official API, but after successfully authenticating, all it ever says is "missing_scope, required_scope: files.metadata.read". (That checkbox is among the many that are checked on my app's config page.)

Have any of you ever successfully used this API to list a folder and read a file?

Note: I am not asking for your anecdote about how you installed the Dropbox GUI on your machine. And even if it is possible to install a Dropbox file-system-impersonating rootkit daemon on a headless CentOS 7 server, I have no interest in doing that. I just want to mirror files out of this one URL, by polling from cron.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.