That granularity makes it pretty much ridiculous. If you do lots of refactoring, it's great. It could well be the case that most people don't refactor as fast

That granularity makes it pretty much ridiculous. If you do lots of refactoring, it's great. It could well be the case that most people don't refactor as fast as people did with the Refactoring Browser in Smalltalk. No refactoring was enabled, unless it was guaranteed to be correct, and you could fire them off almost as fast as you could select the right-click menu. On top of that, you had unlimited undo/redo on the refactorings, and on top of that, there was always the Smalltalk Change Log as an ultimate safety net. So when I was in the zone, I would sometimes get an idea, fire off the prototype of a major refactoring as a dozen rapid-fire operations, look at the result, then back it out if I didn't like it. Refactoring was more exploratory in those days. The Law of Demeter pre-dates those Refactoring Browser days. Basically, it dates from a time before the Refactoring Browser, when people wished they could refactor that fast, but still used the practice heavily. If ease of refactoring isn't that high a priority to you, the cost/benefit of warping your practices around refactoring might not pan out. "Simple as that," to quote the recently departed.