See my comment above for why I don't find this to be that great for server code. If each of those getOrElse() is an actual potential runtime failure (as opposed to just something that could in theory be nil, but you know won't be, by construction), then it's something you're going to need to deal with explicitly.
E.g., think of each of those method calls as being a call to some external system (filesystem, memcache, database, etc) that might fail, even if the code's correct. Throwing an exception is usually a pretty bad strategy for those cases if you want to able to sort out what went wrong later.
E.g., think of each of those method calls as being a call to some external system (filesystem, memcache, database, etc) that might fail, even if the code's correct. Throwing an exception is usually a pretty bad strategy for those cases if you want to able to sort out what went wrong later.