Thaddy, it seems that you made the same mistake like me: not reading the entire thread...
It is the question how to make a function return a boolean result without raising an exception. Under this premise the function must catch all exceptions, and "try ... except on E: Exception..." is the way to achieve this, call it "amateur coding" or not.
Database access, however, is a quite complex task, therefore, I think eating all exceptions is not a good idea here because the reason of a possible failure is hidden from the caller.