Don't hide exceptions

[TalShor]

try:
importlib.import_module("smart_open")
except:
print("smart_open not installed, please pip install smart-open")

Hides the actual exception - I had a pyOpenSSL issue with smart_open (just a version issue) and it took me 10 minutes to understand where is it from.

either do raise Exception post print - or even just print it.
but this is something that's a show stopper - so just let it crash.

[alondmnt]

I agree. usually what we try to do is something like this:

....
except Exception as e:
    if self.errors == 'raise':
        raise(e)
    elif self.errors == 'warn':
        warnings.warn(f'Error joining research_stage: {e}')

and for importing I think that we can try to handle with 'pip install' and then a repeated import (which can then fail).