Hi @tessier0ashpool thanks for taking me up on kicking this off! There are a lot of related topics to your question, which means it might take some time and searching to touch on them all. Either way, keep ping’ing us as the questions come — you’re definitely not the only one interested in this. 
One recent conversation about the Redwood API in general is here “Grokking Redwood”. There’s a lot of momentum to add help + docs + tutorials + guides for making it easier to access and learn about the API. Services is an important concept and component of the API in general.
Speaking of Services, @dom did a great write-up about them here, “Understanding Services”.
Also, did you know there’s a generator for Services?
i’ve checked out the 3rd party api tutorial - and clearly i can just call any api from the client like a blackbox (totally fine), but i’m mostly curious about how (if at all) you plan to extend support for server-side api integrations?
This is a super intriguing question. Could be answered via code snippets (e.g. generators), Cookbooks/guides, npm packages…
Could you start with a specific example of an API integration/service? Or a list? Maybe the next step would be to share some code about what you’re trying to do (no worries, we’re all beginners with it comes to Redwood!) and see if that leads to both progress and ideas about ways to generalize and help everyone?