The protection result values coming from ApiProtect could potentially be ambiguous in the sense that the names of the values aren't fixed.

To give a concrete example from the API page:

"protections": [
            {
                "edit": "autoconfirmed",
                "expiry": "2015-02-24T12:34:56Z"
            },
            {
                "move": "sysop",
                "expiry": "2015-03-25T13:06:20Z"
            }
        ]

In order to know what the protection type applied was, you have to do one of a few things:

• go back to your input, in which case why worry about the result at all?
• assume that the protection type will be the first entry in the result, which isn't future-proof
• examine all possible restriction types and look for keys with those names, which is needlessly arcane
• get truly inventive and remove all other known values, and assume the remaining one must be the protection type/level

This would be better formed, more future-proof, and closer to the output from ApiQueryInfo with inprop=protections if it were structured as:

"protections": [
            {
                "type": "edit",
                "level": "autoconfirmed",
                "expiry": "2015-02-24T12:34:56Z"
            },
            {
                "type": "move",
                "level": "sysop",
                "expiry": "2015-03-25T13:06:20Z"
            }
        ]