I understand your point. We were torn last time when we decided to do this implementation and this is why then we asked you guys (the partners) how to do it.
The feedback then was to go with this behavior as it would allow you the best of both worlds: you can both debug easily if you misspelled a tag or if something is not properly set and also allows you guys to place conditionals to verify if something is set and display or not.
Maybe with the arrival of the "default" filter things will be also easier to handle {{this.salePrice | default : ""}}
-Lucian