It looks like banlist.dat is only actually created if nodes are banned. Otherwise, this will appear on every start:

2016-02-01 09:55:14 ERROR: Read: Failed to open file /home//.bitcoin/banlist.dat
2016-02-01 09:55:14 Invalid or missing banlist.dat; recreating

• The ERROR: makes it look like a serious issue
• It's probably best to just create the file there. But at the very least, the log message shouldn't promise to do something it isn't going to do