A record system doesn't allow to create fields from arbitrary getter-setter pairs. Lenses are an implementation of property system, not a record system. That the heavyweight solution is also used for regular records because Haskell's record syntax is broken is another matter. I still frequently wish I could use lenses in other languages, but they're hard to implement without HKT (I wouldn't be surprised if someone implemented them for Scala though).

EDIT: And to clarify, by in-place updating I meant in-place semantically, not syntatically (the old solution of keeping a record of two functions can do the syntax part too). But I think I probably misremembered how van Laarhoven lenses work and they might not be ultimately different from getter-setter chaining, sorry.