In 0.7 I put quite a lot of design effort into the logging system to allow log records to be redirected in a sane way. It's by no means a complete system, but I

In 0.7 I put quite a lot of design effort into the logging system to allow log records to be redirected in a sane way. It's by no means a complete system, but I think the changes were worthwhile and the core infrastructure is now in place to allow consistent and structured capture of messages from any package which uses the Base logging interface. Exception handling is indeed somewhat of a wart with the core system not having changed much since very early on. I think there's still some serious design work to do and the core people take it seriously. On the other hand, I suspect that numerical codes don't want to use exceptions for much other than "panic and escape to an extreme outer scope". So a lot of the scientific users are probably content for the time being.