We all have our personal flaws.. I have mine.. though mixing => with -> has never been one of them.
I guess, in my mind, references to objects are pointers. That's how I do it in my brain. And dereferencing a pointer in C uses the -> notation. I never really got into C++ which uses the concept of references that "appear" to be actual variables, hence the desire to use dot (.) notation to access the contents of a structure/object.