This is spot on. The design of attrs remines me a little bit of the syntax from a declarative ORM, for example. I'm sure it can do very powerful things that I've not had occasion to use, but it is heavy. The @dataclass format is very clean and seems more like the syntactic sugar that I expect from Python.

One of the prime uses of a dataclass is to be a mutable namedtuple. And the syntax can be almost identical:

    Part = make_dataclass('Part', ['part_num', 'description', 'quantity'])

(from Raymond Hettinger's twitter)

This has the added benefit of not requiring type hinting, if you don't want to bother with such things.