I feel very comfortable with Tastypie, and have pretty well internalized its API. I've got most custom code down to muscle memory. Because of this I don't feel constrained by Tastypie at all.
That said it is very "Django"-y, meaning it's got a high level of abstraction, very opinionated but provides hooks for everything. It's also pays a huge amount of attention to testing.
All that aside I did evaluate DRF for my last project. Tastypie's Django 1.5 support didn't exist, it had some weird interaction issues with our database setup, and it has a huge amount of outstanding issues & pull requests. I spent like 2 days working with DRF and it felt clumsy for me (read: not objectively clumsy, I was just used to thinking about exposing data to a hypermedia API in a particular way). Honestly I just got annoyed by the CBV part. I know some people love them and I'm sure they're great and all, just wasn't for me.
edit: frankly they're doing the same thing, they're both well-written and -maintained. It's just about which API you prefer to work with.
There's a bunch of things in 2.3 that should make working with the CBVs a much more pleasant experience.
* There's no longer any inheritance from Django's GCBV machinery, specifically SingleObjectMixin, and MultipleObjectMixin. The base class was simple enough that it wasn't really necessary. That means no more browsing across multiple codebases, and less class hierarchy to think about.
* Previously there were three base classes, now there's just a single simplified GenericAPIView.
* Several attributes and methods have been moved to pending deprecation or refactored and simplified.
* Using ViewSets means less verbose, repeated view code and easier URL configuration.
Additionally, all the changes are covered by the deprecation policy, so upgrading from 2.2 should be seamless, despite the tweaks to the GCBV implementation.
That said it is very "Django"-y, meaning it's got a high level of abstraction, very opinionated but provides hooks for everything. It's also pays a huge amount of attention to testing.
All that aside I did evaluate DRF for my last project. Tastypie's Django 1.5 support didn't exist, it had some weird interaction issues with our database setup, and it has a huge amount of outstanding issues & pull requests. I spent like 2 days working with DRF and it felt clumsy for me (read: not objectively clumsy, I was just used to thinking about exposing data to a hypermedia API in a particular way). Honestly I just got annoyed by the CBV part. I know some people love them and I'm sure they're great and all, just wasn't for me.
edit: frankly they're doing the same thing, they're both well-written and -maintained. It's just about which API you prefer to work with.