Absolutely. The result of these policies leads to, from my experience anyway, trivial but very difficult to remember passwords that end up getting written down

Absolutely. The result of these policies leads to, from my experience anyway, trivial but very difficult to remember passwords that end up getting written down or reset every time the user attempts to log in to the service. That being said, I find passphrases hard to take on myself. I tend to use a set of mildly complex passwords I've used for years across a number of services. Apparently the new key to passwords is a secure password db that you only keep a master key to access and then paste the passwords contained into services as needed. I've given a few of them a try but even then personally I'm not comfortable having my passwords kept on an external service, even if I have the master password to myself.