Seconded. It provides an API similar to that of Django's various Form classes. It should feel somewhat familiar, even to newcomers. Their documentation is also great with rich examples and explanations.
* pluggable authentication methods (literally adding JWT, session and cookie tokens takes one line of code * pluggable output serializers (want YAML? Plug in a renderer. XML? Same thing) * pluggable documentation generators * Utility methods for handling RESTful response types
DRF has a staggering amount of features that, if implemented by hand, require a stupid amount of time and a 100% guarantee of subtle bugs.