I can't really see a way around it, as its working as intended. When you start noodling with that kind of stuff, where you selectively say "Oh, I didn't meant to actually die" I see this as a road to insanity.

No argument here! I realized I may have been going down the wrong path when I had to start using conditional tests against the Perl interpreter state...

That being said, the whole purpose of the $SIG{__DIE__} wrapper was to (try to) seamlessly add Log4perl output to an existing script without having to hunt down and change all the die() calls in the code.