Yeah, this was to make the programming simple. I can't really think of a way to leave default blank -- I must give it some value to make it a kwarg and thus ignorable by the user. None seemed like the most natural choice.

I do agree that it's not consistent, though, which I don't like either. What I'll probably do is make it consistent by allowing returning None, but add `throw_error=False` as an additional argument. This is basically extending the functionality of the standard `get()` methods to allow throwing an error if the value is not found.