The half that bit us after we started emitting counts is that a count only helps once you know what one unit of it denotes. We had a check reporting zero that was counting lines where we believed it counted records, so it was green, honest, and quietly answering a different question than the one we asked it.

Which is why zero probably deserves to be its own verdict rather than a number. "Nothing matched", "nothing was looked for" and "I measured the wrong noun" all print as 0, and only one of those is good news.