Objects are overkill. Use an iterable of getitem lookups. They compose easily and don’t have much overhead (cpu or cognitive). From the library I use at work, inspired by clojure.core/get-in, it would look like this:

    def get_in(obj, lookup, default=None):
        """ Walk obj via __getitem__ for each lookup,
        returning the final value of the lookup or     default.
        """
        tmp = obj
        for l in lookup:
            try:
                tmp = tmp[l]
            except (KeyError, IndexError, TypeError):
                return default
        return tmp


    data = {“foo”: {“bar”: [“spam”, “eggs”]}}
    # find eggs
    get_in(data, [“foo”, “bar”, 1])

By using __getitem__ you naturally work with anything in the python ecosystem.