Except there are cases where it will be way more pain later and no perceptible loss ahead of time. Imagine you are debugging something and you want to know where your public variable is getting set to 3. If you are using java and public members you will have to check every single call site, whereas if you have a setter you can just add a single if(x==3){} and put a breakpoint in there and you have done in 30 seconds what would have taken 30+ minutes.
Eclipse can add a breakpoint to a variable. Any time that variable is accessed or set, the breakpoint is tripped. That's less than 30 seconds, that's like 5. You literally just click to the left of the variable definition.
The point of my example is you can put a breakpoint under any complex condition, I guess I should have made it more complex something like if(someComplexCalculatedValue() == 10). Anything that can be expressed can be added as a breakpoint if you use setters, then you won't have to step through every assignment, which could be thousands in applications.
