I don't buy into the idea that those kind of classes are just unqualified bad design. The majority of applications exist to merely to store information entered

I don't buy into the idea that those kind of classes are just unqualified bad design. The majority of applications exist to merely to store information entered by users. Using a class to hold that data in a structured and type-checked way is perfectly reasonable. And they aren't a hodgepodge collection of properties; they're entities that represent a single item in a system whether that be a person, a widget, an order, or a product.