> Like, not having a decent REST abstraction

The community has stepped in here.

Django Rest-framework provides one of the best approaches for creating restful apis that any web framework has to offer. For me, using Django is inseparable from using Django Rest-framework. Its what makes working with Django great.

Nodal by comparison does a lot of great things like Django does, but without the robustness of a rest framework behind it, Nodal seems to have created another good framework but not something new and better.