This just in: one particular technique is not good for every use case! Most of these complaints boil down to REST is not complex enough to capture more complex

This just in: one particular technique is not good for every use case! Most of these complaints boil down to REST is not complex enough to capture more complex interactions. But that is its strength -- yeah, there might be some tweaks to make but if you run into a RESTful interface it is easy to get your bearings. If you need something with more meat, pick something else. That said, shoehorning problems into a limited number of return codes with pre-existing specific meanings is an inherent problem with the whole REST approach, I'll give the author that. It is almost never a good fit.