There's also "shortForecast": "Partly Sunny"

I don't know why you think it's deprecated? I don't see that anywhere. They just updated the icons in 2015, which for govt API work is practically yesterday :)

I think it's just that the specifications document, like basically all documentation is out-dated. There are many fields in the output that are not in the documented spec.

My weather needs just call directly to api.weather.gov and have done so reliably for a year or two now, whenever the last API I was using started charging or broke or whatever happened to it(I don't even remember what API it was at this point). So I have no need of your project, but I wish you lots of success!