>I do think a large part of that is due to lack of generics that allow the code to recursively deserialize nested classes and collections without any extra boilerplate other than the class definitions.

Huh? Completely automatic serialization (called activation/passivation) was in the original Stepstone Objective-C, described in Brad Cox's book[1]. No generics required at all, just a modicum of introspection.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Programming-An-Evoluti...