Darktable won't start – wrong path

Sorry, but I don’t agree on this. A crash is never a design option, it’s never intentional. It’s a failure which happens due to a condition that wasn’t accounted for. In other words, it’s a bug.

Explicitly terminating a program, on the other hand, is a precise choice, which normally is dealt with more or less gracefully: as you said earlier, if you decide that the best option is to terminate, you print a message or write a log, so that the reason of the critical error can be reported.

This is a controlled termination, not something that happened because the program didn’t even contemplate that situation.