Why requests return a separate status?

[Toreno96]

According to your official docs, requests return a tuple of (response, status). This is counter-intuitive for me because HTTP status is already present as a property of response, even if the response is other than 2xx:

In [25]: resp, status = jobs_api.getJobDetails('foo')
Non 200 response:404   RequestId:Unknown   URL:https://api.smartling.com/jobs-api/v3/projects/3bea86d16/jobs/foo   response:b'{"response":{"code":"NOT_FOUND_ERROR","errors":[{"key":"not.found","message":"Translation job is not found","details":null}]}}'

In [26]: resp.statusCode
Out[26]: 404

In [27]: resp.statusCode == status
Out[27]: True

That makes it slightly less convenient to use because for each request I would need to remember to ignore status via resp, _ = ….

Or is there a reason status is separate and I should prefer it over resp.statusCode?