It feels like DRF is trying to do too much. I'm not a fan of Django's generic views for much the same reason. I really wanted a framework that was as easy to

It feels like DRF is trying to do too much. I'm not a fan of Django's generic views for much the same reason. I really wanted a framework that was as easy to use as plain Django views while still handling the REST heavy lifting. So I made Delicious Cake: https://github.com/pretend-money/delicious-cake https://github.com/pretend-money/delicious-cake It's based on Tastypie, but features a complete Resource re-design that moves serialization and validation out of the Resource. The power of a REST framework w\ the flexibility of plain old Django views. Two companies are using it in production and a few more are evaluating it. If you love-hate TastyPie you might like it.