I don't see how making attributes private to the class instead tucking them away into a reference makes people not treat objects as glorified structs using accessors to get to the internals.

For me, objects are state-keepers. Methods may cause the object to change state, or they may be used to interrogate the object about its state (or both). How to object keeps its state however, is something only known the the class(es) of which the object is an instance.

Abigail