I think it's a YAGNI problem, perhaps not consciously stated. The premise is if we never touch the public members, we can one day update the setters to add val

I think it's a YAGNI problem, perhaps not consciously stated. The premise is if we never touch the public members, we can one day update the setters to add validation, or analytics, or include some automated formatting shim inside the getter... But nobody actually does it.