[coldtea]

That attitude is the source of billions of dollars in bugs...

Never manually do the work that the compiler / runtime could do.

You can design "more thoughtfully designing your data/object model" (in other regards) AND have the compiler make sure you're not doing null referencing for you (so that that's not your concern anymore) -- instead of manually and in an ad-hoc way per project implementing another menial responsibility into the design of your model.