I've taken to using an intermediate 'service' layer (in the parlance, but not structure, of overholt) to manage metadata on fields and inform serialization. It

I've taken to using an intermediate 'service' layer (in the parlance, but not structure, of overholt) to manage metadata on fields and inform serialization. It looks a bit like Marshmallow, but baked in as a Flask extension. I've been kicking around different approaches to this for over a decade, going back to Castor (Java data binding), and with Python, SQLAlchemy, and the libraries mentioned here I'm finally feeling optimistic. Request parsing in Flask-RESTful seems bolted on, and the fields in WTForms seem frustratingly redundant given that almost everything I do is going through the API anyway. Maybe focusing more on the Fields themselves will help tie it all together.