No, it would only require modifying applications that care to produce better error messages. Any solution that gets better error messages to the users is going to require modifying applications.
With all due respect to *BSD maintainers, I don't see it. Lots of stuff uses udev, despite it being Linux-only. If you want to provide decent error messages to the majority of your users, you'll support it; if you don't care, then you won't.