This is true, and I love DRF but I find it unfortunate then that the concept of Serializer exists. Tom Christie essentially says that Serializers can and should be used outside of views (REST) to decouple and encapsulate business logic. He seems to believe models are database operations-only. This view is fine (e.g., data mapper) but then it seems the scope of DRF is beyond REST and should be part of core.