I conflated two experiences, work + personal dev, and shouldn't have. At work, it's often the tech manager who is responsible for choosing to ignore errors. In personal dev, it's a free enough world so blame doesn't come into it exactly.

Documentation is for end users, not for the installation process. The end user never sees STDERR so the only chance they get to know something is wrong is if it's included with the document. Like jasonk notes, it can be a clue that the documentation didn't even get built. I'm not looking for blame, I'm looking for confirmation that a software package has some integrity and care applied to it. That process does not start at install/make time. For me it starts at browse-CPAN time. I like knowing a distribution is likely garbage or abandonware before I spend 5 hours finding out by trying to use it in a project.

Again, I love having all the options for errors and development. It really wasn't meant as a rant; maybe an overzealous and somewhat spastic defense of the Pod tools' behavior.