400, 422 (or even 404 if the product id was part of the resource URL). That's not shoehorning, that's using something which defines a crude yet semantically con

400, 422 (or even 404 if the product id was part of the resource URL). That's not shoehorning, that's using something which defines a crude yet semantically consistent granularity, that does not prevent having more detailed errors in the response body and/or additional headers. So I get a level of abstraction for free, increasing consistency in semantics and behaviour both inside my API and outside, easing debugging and allowing me to use off-the-shelf HTTP components (including curl) while leveraging common knowledge of the protocol across applications. The pet peeve issue I have with RPC/HTTP APIs is that people keep reinventing HTTP on top of it, only badly (at which point they may as well use RPC/TCP). That's why I like REST/HTTP, because I can "reuse things" when the problem model fits well within that tool (and it very often does). If REST/HTTP becomes a constraint instead of an asset, then maybe one should not use either REST or HTTP, and I'm fine with it because that was not the tool for the job. This is a tool, not a religion.