[Paul-ish]

It seems like, in the absence of panics, there is a dichotomy between "You should know everything that can happen to your program and account for it." and "If you hit some unknown state, carry on." The first one is impossible, the second sounds dangerous. When you get into this dichotomy, panicking seems like a reasonable third option. We should strive for the first, but avoid the second. Nobody wants their code to panic, but we need to be able to deal with unexpected states.

[baby]

Yeah that's what is lacking from my comment: expect panics to happen and attempt to gracefully recover whenever that happens. This is not easy though.