So it seems that the old code I had didn't work in debug mode, although on the current CakePHP 1.2 RC2, I'm not even sure it works at all. However, I decided to take some time to revisit the code. Last time, I simply hacked up the missingAction and missingController calls and it felt kludgy. It looked kludgy.

Instead of abusing the error handler like before he decides to opt for this missingAction/missingController combo to handle the fall through. It doesn't seem to be working 100% correctly, though and he's put in a ticket to see if its a bug or by design.