That's more or less what I'm attempting to do. The search object doesn't return all of the fields. Some fields can't be added to the columns, so load their actual record.

- Which fields? are you using the Record Browser to determine if those field are not actually searchable fields with different IDs?

Add each record to a result set and provide that array of records as the resultant JSON.

- Search result would return a result Object which you will query/get data from with

getValue

or

getText

etc, depending on the field types you need to create your own JSON structure...

However, I then get "For security reasons, only an administrator is allowed to edit an administrator record."  even though I'm not editing a record, but simply loading it

- When you fully load a record is considered editing the record, the restLets and Suitelet are scripts executed

AS

certain user or role, if you want to read administrator info you need to run the restlet as administrator is a secure/well know restriction with NetSuite... only administrator can edit administrator records.

This makes for an extremely frustrating and slow process if I'm going to build an actual, useful RESTful API for our data.

- NetSuite is the most cumbersome system I ever see in my career which is more than 12 years in IT...