The only time I miss exceptions is when I really need non-local return. Stack traces are available, see [1]. Needing non-local return really turns out to be the exception though (sorry). I find I want it when writing recursive descent parsers, and some other deeply nested control structures. In those cases, the panic/recover mechanism can be helpful. But for everything else, returning an error (using a standard error interface) works just fine.

As far as package versioning, what we ended up doing is vendoring everything into our source-control system. This fits our use better all around. For our production systems, we don't want inequality bounds on our library versions. We have tested our system with version X, we only want to ship with version X, not, X.1 or X.2. Vendoring allows us to pick a specific version. Admittedly, this makes more sense in the Go world, where executables tend do be statically compiled.

Vendoring makes it trivial to track local changes to code in our dependencies, and ship them upstream when appropriate. It makes new developer setup simpler. Finally, the Go toolchain has support for vendored code that makes the setup relatively painless. And near instant compilation means that you don't have to wait very long for your dependencies to compile.

[1] https://golang.org/pkg/runtime/debug/#PrintStack