Excellent points. I would much rather have seen a talk on the hard issues such as these. Choosing an algorithm is simple if you already handle the above issues

Excellent points. I would much rather have seen a talk on the hard issues such as these. Choosing an algorithm is simple if you already handle the above issues -- you've already heard a lot about AES by then. On the other hand, choosing AES-CTR as Colin recommends in the talk without handling the above issues is exactly where most developers are today. Put another way: find me one crypto library or application implementing CTR mode that got all the above issues right but used a poor block cipher (not AES or 3DES).