So, when you say "obscure blowup", do you mean, "someone posted any issue whatsoever"?

No, I mean "random malfunction without clear indication of what happened and how to fix it".

Several of those are feature requests, or node-core bugs

Might be a mindset thing. How many of the 8 bugs qualify as feature requests/node bugs for you?

gist or it didn't happen.

The gist is that npm needs to become more defensive, clearly state its own dependencies, and not barf random stack traces in the face of problems. You should also have a unix-guy fix the installer. Demanding 'sudo' is not only an embarrassing but also a potentially dangerous mistake.