> There's a school of thought that would say that by default, error messages shouldn't be a huge scary wall of text, because you have to consider that a majority of the people who would see an error message are not developers, and have no idea what to do with that information.

I think normal users have a pretty good idea what to do with it -- show it to the nearest tech person or paste it into Google.

Just giving it to them up front makes things easier, not harder. They need help so they take a screenshot. If it contains the relevant information, someone can help them. If it just says "an error occurred" then nobody can help with that because it contains no information. Now they have to go back and have the tech walk them through trying to extract the information from some log file, which is seventeen clicks through an interface they've never used and now there are 5000 entries and they don't remember exactly what time it happened etc.

It also deprives the user of any opportunity to learn. The user has a problem, they get a message, they ask the tech what to do and the tech tells them. Now the next time they get the same message they know what to do. But if the message is always the same regardless of the cause then they lose the ability to match known problems with known solutions and give up.

Not all users care to learn that sort of thing, but you take it when you can get it, not purposely inhibit the user from doing it.