It feels weird to see arguments like this when you could just use a language (C++ being the elephant in the room here) that lets you define methods, then call those methods instead.
A method that does will often (depending on the architecture) have much more overhead than a struct lookup. If you're doing hardware stuff, you often care about performance.
True, but this is making the assumption that whatever pointer offsets, shifting, and masking that you have in your method, to extract the 9th bit in the 5th word of a 512 bit struct, will result in the same operations as the simple struct access. It very well could be so (certainly for some architectures, most likely not for others), but I don't think all this complication is justified when a struct is available, especially if you're someone writing code for hardware, where these concepts are more known/less scary.
