For 10 years, people have been talking about REST as if it means something. I could never figure it out. If it means anything more than CRUD, it's lost on me.
I've had the same feeling and finally came to a few conclusion that Fielding's REST architectural constraints lead to client applications that are required to utilize undefined URIs for performance gains. The reason true RESTful APIs are scarce as compared to HTTP/JSON APIs is due to API developers recognizing this issue and choosing to deal with it by making URIs part of the API contract. The REST community has offered no additional guidance or answers other than to point out (correctly) that HTTP/JSON APIs aren't truly RESTful. That is OK.
Here is a much longer comment on reddit where I go through Fielding's thesis and a few other writings and show that following the constraints pretty naturally leads to the outcome above: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2oyj65/api_des...