stuff.a = 8

...is not sufficient, other than a general "well I don't like that". Come on, guy. If you can't give a real actual reason why that won't work for HDL programming, you can be sure as heck nobody is ever going to listen to your idea of changing the way the language behaves.

Have you even attempted to write a descriptor that handles the assignment of signals the way you want and tried it out for a bit?