> perhaps it could just work in a simple, consistent way?

That would be best obviously. But as Benjamin explained it's quite delicate to make it work while avoiding pitfalls where code involved in exception checking may itself fail with arbitrary errors - say, enter an infinite recursion. It's also why I think it would be a bad idea to fix it in 3.2 (the bugfix branch). In 3.3 we can take riskier decisions.