Does anyone else find the RTCC module on PIC24s really awkward to use?

I feel that I must be missing some tricks. I discovered the RTCC module and started using it rather than incrementing global "seconds", "minutes", "hours", "dayOfMonth", "month", and "year" myself on an timer based interrupt event. However, now if I want to extract a timestamp from the module I end up re-constituting the no. of seconds from 2 vars which are contained within the same 16bit field, so even though the C looks a bit messy, the assembly is much worse because it needs to extract...

Does anyone else find the RTCC module on PIC24s really awkward to use?