Very few people actually understand and can explain security, for everyone else it seems to be a monkey-see-monkey-do situation. In this case they probably had

Very few people actually understand and can explain security, for everyone else it seems to be a monkey-see-monkey-do situation. In this case they probably had an intern spend a week coping password policies off of other web sites then they just took one of everything. But in reality longer free-form passwords will trump crazy rule sets like this, especially in combination with 2FA like Yubikey or TOTP (Google Auth). I really wish I knew who was responsible for the idea of blocking cut and paste and how it got so popular. My mortgage company blocks paste on their online payment forms - I think they are hoping people will mistype the amount and they will be able to charge their fat $200 late fee. Luckily there is a great browser extension called Don’t Fuck With Paste that keeps sites from doing stuff like this, everyone should have a copy IMO.