The nice thing about SOAP was it had a full-fledged type system built in. REST is certainly easier to debug, but it's also more likely you'll be required to debug it, since many of the problems you'll run into in a REST interface would have been caught at compile time with SOAP.

SOAP's big problem, IMO, was the crazy insistence on URI formatted namespaces, which took a simple XML message and turned it into something bloated and confusing.