I was in a similar situation. It always takes me way to long to find out that SELinux is responsible for a seemingly impossible to understand error behavior, until I give up, ask a colleague, he mentions SELinux and then it's suddenly obvious. So my conclusion is that the fail-behaviour is just not good. I would prefer my process to be killed with a nice clear error message somewhere. I think it all about giving the user the right information instead of failing silently.