Oh, today I learned the ? operator works with Option as well as Result! I might try that out, thanks.

IIRC, it didn't work with Option in the past, so you might have been correct when your code was written. The ? operator came originally from the try!() macro, which was specific to Result; unlike the macro, it was designed to be extensible through the still-unstable std::ops::Try trait, but IIRC that trait was initially implemented only for Result, and only later was extended to Option and a couple of others.