Does it even make sense to ask this? Accessing fields directly is undesirable as a (java) practice in the first place...

Anyway, I have no idea if it was intentional back when it was specified this way but adjusting it now will cause backward compat. problems as now working applications would suddenly crash during bootstrap.

Proxy fields can be accessed if they are protected or package private --------------------------------------------------------------------- Key: CDI-740 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/CDI-740 Project: CDI Specification Issues Issue Type: Bug Components: Beans, Contexts, Java EE integration Environment: IBM WebSphere Liberty, Java EE 7.0 Full Platform Reporter: Frigo Coder Priority: Major CDI detects and rejects proxyable beans if they expose a public field. However protected and package private fields are silently accepted. In the following example the method returns 0 instead of the correct value of 8: {code:java} @ApplicationScoped public class Car { @Inject private Engine engine; public int numberOfEngineCylinders() { return engine.cylinders; } } @RequestScoped public class Engine { protected int cylinders; @PostConstruct public void init() { cylinders = 8; } } {code}