I hear what you're saying. In this specific case, we had a default success message string that would normally be displayed if a custom message wasn't provided,

I hear what you're saying. In this specific case, we had a default success message string that would normally be displayed if a custom message wasn't provided, so it would've been fine. In general, however, we like to avoid any uncaught/unchecked exceptions whenever possible. This is for two reasons: first, when we get an NPE, the user gets a generic "Oops, something went wrong" type error message, which is useless for them when they call support and don't have an actual error code; second we have a pretty extensive in-house error logging framework that we prefer to report errors on, since it makes debugging the issue easier and gives us aggregate data on what parts of the code have been reporting more issues lately (and probably need a rewrite, like in this case). Thanks for reading!