> I want an expansion of panic free behavior.

Sure, and I'd hardly be one to disagree that a first-party method to guarantee no panics would be nice, but marking unwrap() `unsafe` is definitely not an effective way to go about it.

> but this is the class of error the language is intended to fix.

Is it? I certainly don't see any memory safety problems here.

> This turned into a null pointer, which is exactly what Rust is supposed to quench.

There's some subtlety here - Rust is intended to eliminate UB due to null pointer dereferences. I don't think Rust was ever intended to eliminate panics. A panic may still be undesirable in some circumstances, but a panic is not the same thing as unrestricted UB.

> We should be able to design libraries that provably avoid panics to the greatest extent possible.

Yes, this would be nice indeed. But again, marking unwrap() `unsafe` is not an effective way to do so.

dtolnay's no_panic is the best we have right now IIRC, and there are some prover-style tools in an experimental stage which can accomplish something similar. I don't think either of those are polished enough for first-party adoption, though.