If you're just using objects to represent groupings of strings and encapsulate behavior around converting them back to strings for output at some point, why not

If you're just using objects to represent groupings of strings and encapsulate behavior around converting them back to strings for output at some point, why not just operate on the strings instead of all the serialization / deserialization? Maybe enough of the quick stuff I do isn't enough to warrant more complex data structures, but I get pretty far into a problem with just dicts (in Python) and generally get annoyed when something returns back objects that have no easy str representation without finagling the object into giving me what I need. I think that this is generally a bigger issue with libraries and treating object metadata (stuff like time stamps, extra attributes, etc) as of equal importance as the data it represents; if an object has one obvious attribute for what the thing is, make that the default thing you get when you just refer to the thing, instead of making everyone call some weird method to turn the instance into the representation that you likely want to get out of it.