Sadly the person you respond to is an idiot, their points 1 and 3 have literally nothing to do with REST. You could have all endpoints be /435645646 yet do rest, you can have the most beautifully crafted URLs in the world and do rpc, they're orthogonal concerns. Most people do the latter, incidentally.
> Performing operations is not done via. RPC but rather POSTing a new `mission` to the queue.
That's still RPC. Encoding your procedure calls via HTTP verbs doesn't make it not RPC, it makes it (as originally noted) leverage HTTP as more than a trivial transport.
> There's no HATEOS
So it's not REST, HATEOAS/hyperlinking is the one thing that qualifies your API as REST according to the bloke who originally defined that term: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
> I think I'm starting to get a sense that people can be really opinionated on this stuff
Well yeah imagine you see a nice essay defining or formalising a concept (hyperlinked application interfaces) and creating a word/acronym for it (REST), then you see the world around it coopt it without any of the meaning to qualify something which already existed but has seemingly fallen out of fashion (RPC in this case). That's bothersome.
> seems so simple to define.
If your simple definition of REST is just that you're using HTTP, why would you need a separate acronym for it?