In my experience the direct caller usually tells me very little about the root cause of the exception. The interesting context is often at least ten frames separate from the proximate cause in even moderately complex Java programs. Of course, often there's an additional couple dozen lines in the trace that aren't very useful...

That's sounds like you work on very small projects. That function-that-called-the-function-that-called-the-fun could behave very differently through that path due to calling parameters, environment or data issues.