Can confirm. I have started building a new product. I used standard serializers for everything I can get away with. If I hit a pain point with a serializer th

Can confirm. I have started building a new product. I used standard serializers for everything I can get away with. If I hit a pain point with a serializer that I can't solve in 10 minutes I drop back to manual serialization methods and leave it at that. When I have to tidy up or bring more people we try to do everything by the book because, as you said, there's a lot of very good reasons why REST framework is structured the way it is and the predictability it brings is worth the cost of dealing with edge-case quirkiness.