These were my thoughts, too. Using functions instead of decorators would have many more benefits. I guess they could argue that some of the runtime performance moves to instantiation in the decorator approach.

Still, warn the new coders against it, but don't stone the guy. Let people explore. I'm probably one of the few people who didn't want decorators added at all (I think they're ugly and feel less pythonic than decorating after declaration), but I like seeing people experiment.