Who keeps the Ether when a transaction triggers an exception?

Question

An audit had

"Strong Recommendation: We recommend that exceptions cause all value to be returned to the sender, not the recipient."

What were the technical reasons for not implementing this recommendation? What other parts or behaviors of Ethereum would have been affected if this was "fixed"?

Answer 1

In the case of an exception, the state is rolled back, and all value remains with the sender. In the case of an exception, it is as if the transaction never happened, except that the gas is all given to the miner.

See Exceptions in Solidity for more.