An Appropriate level of REST

REST purists will tell you that you only need four verbs (corresponding to CRU and D) and that to get the caching/performance benefits of REST, all requests must be completely stateless (no cookies, sessions or other user specific identifiers - if you want personalized content you should create one URI per user for that content item).

Realists will point out that trying to hack together a real world system with those limitations (especially one that needs more than just GETs) isn’t worth the trouble and that a "REST-like" approach makes more sense.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm a "REST realist". David Heinemeier Hansson hasn't been able to convince me that you only need four verbs. Anyone else out there using a strict four-verb syntax successfully for a complex system? I get that you could turn additional verbs into "undiscovered objects" but just don't see the point. Any thoughts?