> The original pattern is such a good idea and not even remotely abstract. It's a well defined architectural pattern for a well defined problem yet people still managed to bastardize it to the point that the term REST barely means anything today

The original pattern is extremely abstract and a bad idea. There has been precisely one successful implementation of the original REST "pattern", the web, and only because the pattern was retrofitted onto it; most of the things in REST-as-originally-defined are bad ideas, as any apples-to-apples comparison will show.

I get oppositely frustrated because "REST" was adopted as a rallying cry for one or two good ideas (fitting your protocol to the GET/POST and 2xx/4xx/5xx distinctions from HTTP instead of treating it as a completely opaque transport layer; not wrapping everything in oodles of XML) and the term brought along a lot of bad ideas as baggage. But the meaning of the term shifted towards doing the things that are good because the original meaning was bad.