Yes, it is hard to write a good error message. Sometimes it's not necessary to write a good error message if you can provide something that the user can Google

Yes, it is hard to write a good error message. Sometimes it's not necessary to write a good error message if you can provide something that the user can Google or at least something that's useful to someone who can investigate further. For example, the old "Error occurred, check the logs" is useful because it tells me that there is info in the logs. It's even better if it says "Error 4824 occurred, check the logs" because it gives me an error code to try to look up. Better yet is "Error 4824 occurred, check the foobar-error.log file for transaction_id nv3kd32dx9" which also gives you which error log to check AND gives you a unique ID to grep for. Sadly, I've NEVER seen that type of error message in any software.