1. Exceptions are basically 'goto' with a pretty wrapper. Over time, I've come to believe that the best place to handle an error is close to where it occurs, rather than throwing some hail mary message up the stack and hope someone else can deal with it.

2. Well, it certainly is true that more code and more functionality is likely to contain more bugs. Whether your pid 1 needs to be doing all the things that upstart does is obviously a contentious issue.

3. This is a toss-up. I usually like 'crash loudly' over 'fail silently', but I think rejecting the patch outright was a poor decision.