I would tend to disagree, it's shorter, yes, but I personally try to think of what would happen during a worst case scenario, this code being a part of a huge file that does a lot of stuff (e.g. viewtopic). In that case to follow this method would result in a very large number of local variables being used and they may not be correct (they could be overwritten on mistake easily). the get_* methods (and oop in general) is much longer type and sometimes quite a pain, but the code can be much clearer and much safer (harder to accidently break things).