I agree. In my opinion all tests that test a feature that does not exist on a target should spew a warning and pass, not fail cryptically. This requires the test writer to
a) determine if the feature should be present on the target
b) test the feature
Usually only b) is implemented by CrOS developers causing problems when tests are run outside of the hardware lab where images are carefully paired with matching autotest bundles.

Notice CTS has solved this issue precisely as described above: two separate checks, a) using the support of the build system which leaves build information - in this case the peerd flag - on the DUT's image.

Also adding Dan, as he has been looking at adding this step automatically to the tast framework, so the flag/check might already be available on DUTs.

My plan for Tast was/is to make the test framework provide a way for tests to declare system image dependencies in the form of USE flags. In other words, peerd-related tests would declare that they require the peerd USE flag to be set, and those tests would be automatically skipped on boards that don't have the flag.