why does BigDecimal.divide not do the same thing as Java's BigDecimal.divide method

This seems to have been introduced in order to resolve: https://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/KT-10462

i find myself saddened by this ...

Yes. But it looks like there's no good choice here. Maybe the

/

operator should not have been provided at all?

i'd have been OK with it throwing arithmetic exception. at least then you know you have to provide more info.