One of the reasons developers 'let it crash' is because no one wants to pay for error recovery, and I mean the whole design (including system level), testing, and long-term maintenance of barely used code.

THAT SAID isolation of the decoding code and data structures, having a way back to either checkpoint/restore or wipe out bad state (or, proving the absence of side effects, as SPARK dataflow contracts allow, for example) is better design, I wish would be taught more often. I really dislike how often exception propagation is taught without showing the handling of side effects...