"Toilsome" is probably the most kindly yet still accurate thing one could say about exposing HATEOAS to the real world, at this particular point in time.
Every 1.0 web app developer in the world implemented HATEOAS to a great extent without even thinking about it.
It's only toilsome when you try to shoe-horn it into a traditional data API, rather than accept it as a unique descriptive aspect of the early web architecture.
