[MrJohz]

I don't know if that's such a good nitpick in practice. I want my code to crash if my assumptions aren't true - especially if I'm in the process of developing the code, I want to see big red errors and stack traces that point directly to the line that failed.

If it's meant to be the case that the element may or may not be present, then I'd much rather see an explicit check for that, than assume one thing and find out another later.