Original access has to be via get_property(), yeah. Sometimes those values are saved, if they're going to be re-used, but that's about it.
I swear I once had a really good idea for handling stuff like this that would have made it worth a bit of a re-write from the devs, but I can't remember what it was. And as JH said, without some major benefit, not just the nice-but-not-really-huge consistency thing, it doesn't seem like a good use of time.