How to Use Django to Create Efficient Queries and Serializers

Django's query set is a very simple spec for saying, here's all the fields that I'm interested in. It pulls out only the data that you actually need to create your API endpoint shape. And then the other thing that it does is it generates your serializer for you. So instead of being bound to rest framework very tightly and only working with rest framework, what if we could turn this into a bit more of a generic concept?