TBH, this is what happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force haha. I saw the rest of your comment above now, and I realize (please bear in mind, I was typing on my phone while walking through noisy Praha, after some wine) that I was thinking of getattr while I was typing that. I also scrolled up to realize the bug you mentioned (re: returning the sentinel value). Also, my gratuitous use of the misspelled "SENTINAL".
Despite our alpha mentalities, we are not worlds apart, truthfully. My original response came across sounding hardliner pro-try-except, anti-anything-else, but my point was only that people abuse exception handling in their primary business code (e.g., directly handling a network IOError in a Django view). As a result, they have a bad time. Libraries and utils should be relegated to exception handling duties like that. When following principles like developers love Python's try / except blocks for their clarity.