Ah, I see what you're saying. On the one hand, I think queue["size"] _may_ be more straightforward than queue._size, but on the other hand, I think users that are using things like the queue size and total messages should have an interface that encourages them to check the documentation and get the caveats that come with that information--namely, it's only current to the time of the request. The change to returning a dict comes at the cost of castrating our Queue class to the point where it's nothing more than a glorified HTTP client, not really representative of anything at all. It just makes the request syntax look pretty.