Reducing UFS corruption from unclean shutdowns?

I panic my development VM regularly.  Each time, I need to fsck the
file system.  Even if I had run sync(8) just before the panic, I
frequently find corruption.  What should I change to make sync(8)
work, or at least to make corruption rare?  It looks like my root file
system is using soft-updates+journal.  Should I disable those?

-Alan