Removing data then accessing would allow invalid memory access and often crash. Example: import bpy image = bpy.data.images.new(name="a", width=5, height=5) bpy.data.images.remove(image) print(image.name) Now access to the removed data raises an error: ReferenceError: StructRNA of type Image has been removed This is the same level of error checking that was done in blender 2.4x but was made difficult by RNA functions not having access to the PyObject's.