Thanks for the comment. We actually originally had a waitUntil function that was basically used for all three of the cases I mentioned above. In some sections of the code, it was just there to eat errors, other sections get some text, and yet others it was wrapped in an assert and needed to return a boolean. This led to chronic misuse around the code (I found 4-5 tests that simply forgot to wrap it in an assert effectively rendering the test completely worthless). The main benefit we got from splitting the methods out was making it clear to developers what it did. Catching all the exceptions thrown by Selenium instead of returning booleans was just an added benefit.

And you are correct, we are using Scala. There are some really cool things about the language, case classes, pattern matching, first order functions, and traits just to name a few.