Hm, I'm a bit suspicious about the manipulating the "inner" Doohickey object, but it's hard to tell without the specifics. If it were my code I'd start analyzing dependencies and refactoring, but then again, it's hard to tell without code.

To me, it smells of an object model which is not quite aligned with what it is trying to model.

As ever, just my 2 cents, -gjb-