[lostcolony]

Can't comment on your other issues (I'll say I have noticed the complete opposite in practice, where the same team working with Java vs Erlang led to far more reliable, performant systems in Erlang, but I obviously can't speak to your experience), but for (2) -

You always care about exceptions/errors. The thing is, most you won't predict/can't handle. Those you do predict, and know how to handle, you should, because they're not really errors/exceptions at that point; they're just edge cases.

The point of Erlang is not to make it so you just throw instead of addressing an edge case; it's to make it so you reason about how, if something you don't predict and don't know how to handle happens, you can get back into a known good state. It's actually phenomenal at doing that. I've had complicated user facing production systems work without noticeable issue for years (even while under active development) in Erlang. I've never seen that in any other language. Not to say it can't happen, I just haven't seen it, and the operational lift to achieve that was no different for us than just "make it work"; we were spending the same amount of time thinking about failure cases with the Erlang system as other languages. The difference was a better approach to handling the things we didn't think of.