We just discussed this at our local JUG meeting last night. My take is that accessors are popular in Java because most popular frameworks (esp. Spring) have a heavy reliance on JavaBeans. Once you start using objects everywhere as JavaBeans, you've no choice but to add them. And the IDE makes it trivial. Yes, there's constructor instantiation in most DI containers, but it's not frequently used.

I do agree that most modern languages have a much more elegant solution for this.