I had a custom authenticator that was misconfigured, and it tried to import a settings.SOME_NAME when SOME_NAME did not exist in my settings module. This caused an AttributeError, so when the APIView tried to authenticate and called request.user, the Python property call swallowed this error, and gave me a "'WSGIRequest' object has no attribute 'successful_authenticator'" error instead, masking the real issue in my code.

I've got a pull request that demos this issue. It seems to happen on bad module references. I don't have a good solution, but maybe not having an authentication side effect inside a property definition might do the trick.

I'm happy to take a stab at a solution, but could use some guidance!

Pull Request: #1938