I feel that although the query parameters mapped to the ORM is powerful, instead of copying Django with things like id__gte=3 instead the default out the box for Nodal should be to subscribe to either json:api or HAL as an API standard.

json:api for example would support filtering and pagination in a standard way.

Ideally the API user should be abstracted away from the data store behind the scenes. Most implementations over time will involve doing more than mapping REST to CRUD and will require those using the framework to add increasing business logic between the CRUD operations on the data store and API payload being sent back to the API consumer, making the current method of query parameters not suitable.