It wasn't intended to be FUD. The letsencrypt client needs to change the configuration of other services. This is a fact. Not everyone is happy about that, so I

It wasn't intended to be FUD. The letsencrypt client needs to change the configuration of other services. This is a fact. Not everyone is happy about that, so I pointed out an alternative. If you're happy with the official client, by all means, use it! There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, it's just not compatible with the way I and some others prefer to do things. EDIT in response to your edit: > And about all these "minimalistic tools": I've seen one that literally did "new-cert.sh > $cert-file". If it failed (e.g. due to ratelimit, no internet connectivity, ...), it would null your old cert! Written and used by very smug people. Absolutely, the minimal tools are not for people who don't know what they're doing. You absolutely would not run acme-tiny for example with write access to your actual cert that the web server is using, because any number of failure scenarios would result in downtime. That's why I specifically addressed that in the initial post you're replying to when I said: "Then it checks that the new certificate is valid, copies it to the right places and reloads the relevant services".