Interestingly I prefer failing hard specifically for data consistency reasons. I've had to deal with systems that swallowed far too many errors and let themselv

Interestingly I prefer failing hard specifically for data consistency reasons. I've had to deal with systems that swallowed far too many errors and let themselves get into an inconsistent state which then caused other operations to not fail but instead persist invalid data. It's very hard to clean messes like that up (restoring a nightly backup is easy, but that's a last resort).