[naasking]

> Who are all these ComSci researchers who are most comfortable with these concepts and distinctions, anyway, and who are also designing web APIs?

More than you realize, I'm sure. There are plenty of industry people who can understand theses and other research publications. You can find them here, on reddit, on stackoverflow, and on lambda-the-ultimate.

> At some point, if you wish any real system to use your ideas, you need to communicate it in some way that explains it for a typical software developer.

That's what books and blogs are supposed to be for, but how many of these people do you think spoke with Fielding before writing about REST to ensure they got it right?

Fielding's emphasis on abstract concepts are because REST isn't tied to HTTP, or HTML, or XML, or JSON. He's trying to explain calculus to you so you can solve many problems, and you keep focusing only on how to calculate velocity given acceleration just because that's the problem in front of you right now.