What's the point of OOP?

There's no empirical evidence that suggests that object orientation is a more natural way for people to think about the world. There's some work in the field of psychology of programming that shows that OO is not somehow more fitting then other approaches.

Object-oriented representations do not appear to be universally more usable or less usable.

It is not enough to simply adopt OO methods and require developers to use such methods, because that might have a negative impact on developer productivity, as well as the quality of systems developed.

Which is from "On the Usability of OO Representations" from Communications of the ACM Oct. 2000. The articles mainly compares OO against theprocess-oriented approach. There's lots of study of how people who work with the OO method "think" (Int. J. of Human-Computer Studies 2001, issue 54, or Human-Computer Interaction 1995, vol. 10 has a whole theme on OO studies), and from what I read, there's nothing to indicate some kind of naturaless to the OO approach that makes it better suited than a more traditional procedural approach.

The real world isn't "OO", and the idea implicit in OO--that we can model things with some class taxonomy--seems to me very fundamentally flawed

While this is true and has been observed by other people (take Stepanov, inventor of the STL), the rest is nonsense. OOP may be flawed and it certainly is no silver bullet but it makes large-scale applications much simpler because it's a great way to reduce dependencies. Of course, this is only true for “good” OOP design. Sloppy design won't give any advantage. But good, decoupled design can be modelled very well using OOP and not well using other techniques.

Its a programming paradigm.. Designed to make it easier for us mere mortals to break down a problem into smaller, workable pieces..