That's a good way to put it, and yeah I would agree that's how I like to use errors: give me the details I ask for and let me ignore the ones I don't care about. Sometimes an "error" isn't really an error, and at those times exceptions are overkill. Sometimes an error really is an error and I need to let the user know something went wrong, give them enough details to let them fix it and wait for them to try again.