I think the thing people miss about objects in this scenario is that they don't have to be used directly by everything. That is, if I have an object that contains a list of names, `grep' doesn't have to support grepping over my object, it just has to support grepping over a list. You can just call `grep myObject.names Phil'.

I don't think making objects less generic is a good idea, but rather we need to interact with them differently.