The figure of merit is security vs memorability. You could imagine two different passwords machine generated with the same entropy under plausible selection sc

The figure of merit is security vs memorability. You could imagine two different passwords machine generated with the same entropy under plausible selection schemes: some w$#J8fe keysplat or the selection of 5 words from a dictionary of common words. Both would be equally secure against a password guessing attacker, but the common word one would be easier for most people to remember. If you held memorability constant, the character-splat password would be less secure. You could imagine a hybrid, but the one you demonstrate is the kind that humans construct on their own where some characters are replaced with lookalike symbols-- these sorts of adhoc schemes are well modeled by replacement rulesets and markov-model password guessing algorithms and don't tend to add a ton of entropy. They do hurt memorability a fair bit and the better done (from a security perspective) the worse the hit on memorability. The comic's author would probably argue just adding an extra word is better from a security and memorability perspective, or at least I argue that. :)