Well, for starters, your application is confirmed to not be operating correctly;

An error message does not mean the application didn’t operate correctly. Not able to write to disk, is a correct behavior with expected “errors”. The correct way to handle it depends on the application, but if it is about to show a message, then they could also incorporate more useful information that is already available.

Another issue is parsing the log - while it’s not too difficult to check if it’s a disk related issue, accurately and successfully parsing the specific cause is maybe not so easy.

Exactly why the developer should do it, not the end user. But if there is an error message, it does not necessarily mean they have to parse log files. In most cases most important and relevant information should be available already.

It really depends, and depending on what the software does there are all sorts of odd little seeming issues that can make the whole process a headache.

Maybe. But on the other side, it could also be a very simple process of adding a variable or a standard procedure. If there are discussions with 2000 pages about unclear error messages, then there is definitely something wrong. And the developers for this has to do something about it. Bringing attention to these issues is not a bad thing (although I don’t think Valve reads Lemmy posts).

at least has errors that make sense

I agree. At last…

Edit: The point is, the application shows an error message that it could not write the file to disk. What file? I mean it would at least know what file, otherwise it could not check for not able to write it.