I think you are falling into the trap of thinking you can usually recover from an exception. Exceptions are usually caused by one of two things:

1) system error (no more DB connections, hard drive full, etc)

2) a bug

neither of these are recoverable, you just need to stop the task at hand and notify someone that the situation needs to be fixed. Trying to handle it and recover is usually a fools errand that results in hiding the problem

There are cases that you do want to handle exceptions. In these cases, yes catch the exception and handle it. But these cases are the 10% case, hence the default behavior of making the caller handle the exception isn't desirable.

This link from 2003 articulates the point better than I can: http://www.artima.com/intv/handcuffs.html