MAINT: should not capture and reraise all Exceptions

There are a couple try/except for the very generic Exception. I think there would be benefits in making those more specific and let though the original exceptions rather than reraising everything as e.g. a DALFormatError or alike.

Search the codebase for try/except blocks catching the generic Exception and inspect the surrounding callers and tests. Determine which exceptions each operation can actually handle, then verify that expected DAL errors remain translated while unrelated original exceptions are allowed through. The issue does not name specific files or tests, so the initial scope requires project familiarity.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.