What do you mean with an afterthought and second rated? Maybe you mean that it's not defined in the "protocol" itself, REST is not really much of a protocol any

What do you mean with an afterthought and second rated? Maybe you mean that it's not defined in the "protocol" itself, REST is not really much of a protocol anyway, but rather a set of guidelines on how to use HTTP sanely to make a CRUD API. You can still have all your REST API's from your application follow a certain agreed on "REST protocol". If you use a framework / library for making the API then usually you don't really have to think about that (much).