The problem with them all always comes when the ever-steady march of abstractions, features, and edge cases results in one routine throwing the same two error classes but in different places, and how you handle them is different despite being the same wrapper. Add a thousand developers and several years of churn, and poof you get extremely complex bugs that result from errors seeming to come from one place, but actually coming from another.

Having been on the receiving end of debugging that a few times, I no longer mind the in-band error handling, although admittedly I'm inexperienced enough to be confident its better. Just for the random code I've had to read where I just need to know exactly how something I didn't write and will never read again works, and whether the error is handled and how, i love reading in-band error handling, even if I too dislike the way an error laden routine must be written. Over time I've come to appreciate elegance "in the large" as opposed to the code I see in any individual function.