I think until we have a way of doing automated service discovery for REST (and OPTIONS is a very lame excuse, knowing what verbs I can use gives me nothing), ha

I think until we have a way of doing automated service discovery for REST (and OPTIONS is a very lame excuse, knowing what verbs I can use gives me nothing), having 10 bajillion verbs for slightly different semantics doesn't matter. Having a small and standardized set of verbs helps developers, and that's all that matters. And even if we can do automated discovery, what does that really give us? What software is there that automatically crawls unknown APIs, discovers functionality, and then does something useful with it? The semantics of the commands matter, and it's hard to infer that unless you're a human. No amount of HTTP verbs will fix that. For now, good documentation is fine.