Using bare data structures makes it impossible to use methods. Therefore, using a parent class at the beginning sounds reasonable.

The child classes could have a method to create an instance from a given parent class instance, and you can implement it any way you like - rebless the object, or rebless its clone, and so on, plus all the checks you need to allow the transition. Thus, the "dirty" code stays in the class and doesn't pollute your users' code.

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