"But these "new" schemes are doomed to password failure right away, by "Forcing users to choose non-random passwords" -- i.e., "You cannot choose your characters at random, you must select mixed case and numeric and etc. etc."
Which is why length of the password is substituted for the randomness of individual characters to increase entropy.
Your point is valid for excessively short passwords combined with rules like "one upper case, one lower case, one number and one symbol" but once you go beyond 30 characters, the entropy should still be sufficient to resist most brute force efforts and any common patters would still make it unlikely to simplify the search space significantly.
This assumes the password is in use for the coming 2-3 years and viable quantum computing that is orders of magnitude faster than current systems doesn't becomes available .
Biting the hand that feeds IT
