I believe private fields are a feature that actually increases the expressivity of a language, as per the formal definition. This one can't be replaced by some

I believe private fields are a feature that actually increases the expressivity of a language, as per the formal definition. This one can't be replaced by some trivial, local syntactic sugar. Of course increasing expressivity is not the end goal in itself for a PL, but I do agree with you that this (and some other, like no unused variable - that one drives me up a wall) design choice makes me less excited about the language as I would otherwise be.