Why do we need anything more than HTTP GET, PUT, POST?

Question

What is the practical benefit of using HTTP GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, HEAD? Why not focus on their behavioral benefits (safety and idempotency), forgetting their names, and use GE

Answer 1

No one posted the kind of answer I was looking for so I will try to summarize the points myself.

"RESTful Web Services" chapter 8 section "Overloading POST" reads: "If you want to do without PUT and DELETE altogether, it’s entirely RESTful to expose safe operations on resources through GET, and all other operations through overloaded POST. Doing this violates my Resource-Oriented Architecture, but it conforms to the less restrictive rules of REST."

In short, replacing PUT/DELETE in favor of POST makes the API harder to read and PUT/DELETE calls are no longer idempotent.