I agree, and I appreciate your insight. When I say "legacy", I mean at least 10-20 years. I know that's not much for some people but it is for me.
I'll look into whether I can redesign the existing database. The existing codebase isn't the most straightforward which is the reason for me porting it to Ignition.
I guess all that I need is just a way to make these properties not visible or writable to an end user. After changing them to private I can still see them in the dev console.