I know what you mean. I've often shied away from using REST simply because I like to setup the APIs as classes and use the classes directly in my internal code

I know what you mean. I've often shied away from using REST simply because I like to setup the APIs as classes and use the classes directly in my internal code usage. REST breaks that for me, not only because the paradigm is different, but if it was truly REST I'd be making CURL calls to myself to get the data which single-handedly bloats my code by an order of magnitude... It definitely deserves some discussion to find out if there is a way around this problem as blindly going REST can cause some very difficult problems down the road.