[xavdid]

IMO, Django Rest Framework has too much magic for my tastes. I haven't spent much time with it (which is maybe why it's so confusing), but it always seems like I need to set certain properties and then it "just works"; I haven't found a good list of those magic properties.

[Daishiman]

The reality is that DRF documentation can fail at the edges because it's a big framework, however it's ridiculously well documented compared to 95% of frameworks or libraries I've used.

For the edge cases, you can read the source code; it's very clear and well commented. And if you fail to understand a feature, it's relatively easy to drop to a lower level of abstraction without losing too much.

Ex: don't like nested serializers in a read-only method? Just write a serializer method and return your own JSON. Can't grok ViewSets with mixins? Just use a regular API view and override what you need. Don't like routers? Use regular views, and so on.