I think the different definitions for REST have really muddied the water. To the REST purist, RAML is falling well short of being truly RESTful for reasons which you've mentioned. In other words, RAML isn't REST at all. To most others, REST is simply another RPC, like SOAP (hence all of the comments saying this is not much better than SOAP). Those of the latter thinking need someway to describe how their API should be consumed other than hypermedia types, so specs like RAML are born.
On their site, they say, "RAML isn't strict: in the end it is only describing HTTP with a few higher-level (optional) constructs." Looks like it's aiming to describe HTTP and URLs rather than hypermedia types.
Comments
I think the different definitions for REST have really muddied the water. To the REST purist, RAML is falling well short of being truly RESTful for reasons which you've mentioned. In other words, RAML isn't REST at all. To most others, REST is simply another RPC, like SOAP (hence all of the comments saying this is not much better than SOAP). Those of the latter thinking need someway to describe how their API should be consumed other than hypermedia types, so specs like RAML are born.
On their site, they say, "RAML isn't strict: in the end it is only describing HTTP with a few higher-level (optional) constructs." Looks like it's aiming to describe HTTP and URLs rather than hypermedia types.