Yeah, I was debating just putting it in there too, but it was easier to test the retry and the different cases of whether a 'delete' succeeded separately.  Also, the implementation is fairly long and has its own inner functions.  :|  I was hoping it would be shorter and so can more easily be encapsulated in the other function.

Unrelated, but I was also thinking about just having a generic 'time_deferrred' function that takes a callable that returns a deferred, a callable that formats a log message for success and a callable that formats a log message for error, but it doesn't actually shorten the implementation of 'verified_delete' much.