Some additional background - we actually want unpublished pages to fall back to a 404, but because of the template error the server throws a 500 and the user gets our friendly error message page instead of our friendly 404 page. Is falling back to a 404 even possible? I couldn't find anything specific in the documentation....
I'll check the hotfix and nuget package versions, as well as try to reproduce using the DG reference MVC app and will follow up on this thread with updates.