>I obviously did not understand the "reference" part of all that. I wish I understood why this doesn't work.

Ok, I'll try one more time.

When you add an object to the form (or any container object), the object now have an access to the form and its methods/properties.

If you add a reference to the object created with createobject syntax, this object doesn't know the object it's being added as a reference to and thus can not access that object methods/properties.

So, you would have to somehow save the "parent" object inside this "child" object (Hugo's idea) , but it may easily lead to dangling references and other bad things.