Authentication shenanigans and needing to use PATCH in a sane way are much better reasons for using a custom client than all six reasons listed in the original

Authentication shenanigans and needing to use PATCH in a sane way are much better reasons for using a custom client than all six reasons listed in the original article... I don't get what you mean about data paths, though. Even if you had a hypothetical good REST client you'd still want a single point to do the URL string assembly to save typing and do some validation but this doesn't really require a whole different client.