I'd have to think a bit more about other differences (when the start of the semester isn't upon me). I do see why NamedTuples could feel more in line with the DCIC style, but I also see the challenges that students have jumping into full classes after the syntactic brevity of Pyret and Python.
That's understandable. The early incarnations of NT have been kinda yuck to force on students. However the recent versions have solidified NamedTuple to not even require explaining decorators. It read a tad awkward in the text having to explain why the dataclass didn't change form to get mutability.
typing.python.org/en/latest/sp... - to add to the confusion, googling for "python namedtuple" still takes students to the older form in the "collections" module. So I was wondering what went into the choice.