That's interesting, because as a frontend engineer, I find most RESTful APIs to introduce more "needless hassle", mostly in the form of making me send multiple requests to get data multiple levels deep and then consolidating it on the frontend, rather than just sending me what I want to begin with.

I agree with query building being tedious, though I'm working on a query builder helper library to make this less painful. Hopefully at some point I can open source it.