I wish that handling/rethrowing wasn't required, but that at dev-time I could just ask, hey, what's every kind of exception that could be thrown out of this expression & then decide which ones I wanted to handle at this level, if any.
Handle some, declare the method throws the others?
Kinda like if everything was a RuntimeException, but I had a way to figure out what are all the subclasses of RTE that this expression could produce.
Consider how Swift does exceptions. You mark methods as throwing methods, but you don't say what kinds of exceptions can be thrown. If you call a throwing method, you have to write a catch, but in order to figure out what kinds of different things can be thrown, I have to rely on documentation or on examining the source. AFAIK, there's no way to figure out all the different types of exceptions that can be thrown.
I want something in the middle. I want the conciseness of swift, but the info provided by java while I'm writing. I'm no language designer, so I don't even know if that's possible, but it's the kind of pony I want.
I do want to know what the error-path contract is, and I do want it enforced that I deal with them. I've seen too much crap in my time that just assumes the happy path, when error handling and recovery are just as important, IMHO