category base permalink 404s by itself

Hello, I just wanted to know if this is normal: I’m using pretty permalinks, and everything works fine if don’t mess around with the URLs, but if I am, for example, in the wordpress/category/mycategory archive, and remove the last bit from the address bar to just wordpress/category, I get a 404. Is this how it works? Isn’t there a way to redirect this kind of thing to the front page or somewhere more friendly? I know it’s a bit petty, but I’d rather not have my users slamming into 404s by removing stuff from the addresses.

I was probably going to use the WP-No-Category-Base and WP-No-Tag-Base plugins anyway, so it wouldn’t really be an issue, but this also happens with custom taxonomies, and I’m not sure there’s a reliable plugin for removing the base in these.