Sounds to me that deepsun and I are in agreement that an error message should tell you what the actual error was.

I.E. ERROR: TLS handshake failed: <DOMAIN> certificate chain unverified

This is why stack traces exist. But I agree Java seems to not really have a culture of “make the error message helpful”, but instead preferring “make the error message minimal and factual”.

For what it’s worth, the rise of helpful error messages seems to be a relatively new phenomenon the last few years.