> stdout and stderr output often ends up in a black hole

Ain't that the truth. Literally every crontab I've written for the last 10 years has had this in it:

2>&1 | logger -t cron-WHATEVER

...and that does a pretty good job of capturing anything that the script emits and making it easy to grep for in syslog the following morning.

But I'm still amazed at how many crontabs I run across that don't capture any output at all.