Well, that's coming from the perspective of someone who doesn't like "private" in the first place; it forces me to rely on whatever use cases the author has ima

Well, that's coming from the perspective of someone who doesn't like "private" in the first place; it forces me to rely on whatever use cases the author has imagined and makes extending the class in a novel manner a pain. Except this is PHP, so I can just go change the "private" to "public" anyway. Namespacing within an inheritance tree is a problem, yes, but just hiding as much of your namespace as possible sucks. As does ahem ahem double-underscore prefixing. Surely there's another option here, but until someone figures out what it is, I'm okay risking collisions.