In a dozen or so years of administrating many different Unix machines, I've never had cron email be a problem and I get a few (useful) emails from various cron scripts every day.

This interacts badly with many unix commands, which often send status info to standard out. Some commands have a quiet options, but that can turn off all error output too.

Maybe it's that I've mostly been administrating BSD machines, and so most of the tools follow old Unix guidelines like not printing anything unless it's necessary, echoing errors to stderr, using proper exit statuses, etc. (http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/interfaces.html) I think it's a GNUism/Linuxism that commands are overly chatty, writing junk all over stdout (like author/license information - do we need to see this every single time?), and using ANSI colors by default.