I haven’t had time to really digest this proposal yet, but I want to put my hand up for being strongly in favour of some ergonomic improvement here. Error handling is really important, it is a fundamental area which distinguishes high quality code from low quality code. However, like unit tests and documentation, it is an area of programming which feels like taking medicine - we know we should, we know it is good, but it is not fun. Therefore, we should strive to make proper error handling in Rust as ergonomic as possible. Furthermore, although our current system has many advantages, it still feels a bit clunky to use (and especially to convert non-error handling functions into properly error-handling functions) compared to languages like Java with a built-in exception mechanism.
To put it another way, we need a really nice carrot here to bribe people away from unwrap.