Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I sound like a fundamentalist, but how is anything like REST? It's an RPC protocol! Nothing against RPC, but it doesn't fit any of the REST constraints, except for the client-server; it's not stateless, it can't have middle-man caching and it doesn't really follow an uniform interface. It's nothing like REST (and as such it doesn't get its benefits).
Speaking as the protocol designer, the eventual intention for DDP is to model reactive data set publishing in a sufficiently semantic way that it can be cached by proxies. We didn't get there in pre1 and decided to not let that block Meteor 1.0, but it is the goal for the future when we have some post-1.0 breathing room (and when the Meteor community needs it.) The idea behind DDP is that HTTP got us three huge benef…
DDP seems like a good technology for webapps, but the issue is that I find webapps a really uninspiring trend in web development; my vision for the web is much more data-oriented than the code silos we're all making. And I believe the lack of understanding of what REST means is preventing people from seeing a bigger picture.
Also, many modern apps have verbs that don't map well to REST (a RPC like transferBalance affects multiple objects and doesn't map well to the idea of updating the representation of an object identified by a URL)
I've heard that a lot, and I don't doubt that it's true in many cases, but usually it seems more representative of a difficulty in the modeling process.
For example, a transferBalance call certainly doesn't map well to updating any object, but creating a new Transfer (and passing the URLs of both Accounts) would be perfectly RESTful, in my opinion.