I agree with you on Google+ being the path forward, but I cannot agree with you on supporting Google+ instead of (or along with) Picasa.
The APIs for Google+ and Picasa are very different. The former is more flexible and better documented, but it doesn’t have support for things for which APIs already exist … and one of such things is the photos’ module, a.k.a. Picasa. The only things that the Google+ API supports are users and user activities such as sharing or commenting (that doesn’t include photos).
And since Google+ is the path forward, they have been treating Picasa as the undesirable stepchild, hence it hasn’t seen any useful upgrades. This attitude is apparently a very common malaise amongst Google-folk, as per quite a few of my friends who work there.
The net result of this rock-and-a-hard-place situation is that given a Google+ album ID, there is absolutely no API for me to figure out what the Picasa album name should be. And I can’t dump the existing Picasa API because there isn’t anything from Google+ that replaces it.
So for now I am stuck telling people to get the ID from Picasa rather than using the Google+ album ID.