Yeah, it's annoying, it's all political reasons too AFAICT. LE is also verboten because of stipulations from Certain Government Departments. There was definit

Yeah, it's annoying, it's all political reasons too AFAICT. LE is also verboten because of stipulations from Certain Government Departments. There was definitely pushback years ago about just using LE because "it's bad for security" which effectively translated to "we don't trust it because it's free and we have less control over the domains issued". Hopefully that mindset changes now that LE is well-established. Also should be noted that technically most of the domains are owned/purchased by the research councils (govt level) and they buy certificates which cover like 100 different domains (wtf, this seems ripe for domain-squatting) at a time, so at least they're getting their moneys worth out of those certificate renewals. So it takes even longer for us to get certs because the _research council(s)_ are busy batch-renewing certs for multiple institutions they're involved with. Individual research projects also end up with their own domains that one EU country pays for, another country hosts, and a third one manages, because they all met up for beers in Brussels for a kickoff meeting and decided that was the fairest way of doing it. Each institutions IT department trying to make sense of the chaos which the principal investigators are creating, "seek forgiveness rather than permission" :-)