However I think what this whole discussing is missing is the properties that you derive by adhering to a REST design.
I think there should be some tests of a design to see if you are actually getting the benefits of REST.
For example in a REST design you can re-arrange the internal URL's in a server and the site is still usable to clients because they are following links from the root.
Why do we want this ability to rearrange URLs?
Example: think of posts here on HN. One thing a specific media format would include is a "reply" link, but on hellbanned posts that link would absent, so that state would be inaccessible to clients.
Or say you've used comments on your blog, so each post has a link to the list of comments about it. Now you switch to Disqus, and so you could change the URL to point to their comments pages instead, and a decent client would use it transparently (assuming good media types).
All of this is taken for granted and used a lot on the real RESTful space: the HTML Web.