I am not trying to be edgy here when I say that I have viewed a lot of the "syntactic sugar" business with a great deal of skepticism. Piggybacking off of your

I am not trying to be edgy here when I say that I have viewed a lot of the "syntactic sugar" business with a great deal of skepticism. Piggybacking off of your example, upon reflection I believe that me looking askance at decorators is partially a learned fear (I escaped Perl), and partially because decorators seem a little like "bad magic," where you have cast a handy but seemingly innocuous spell only to find that it has deeper consequences later.