That's a good long term solution but when policies force you to change your password every 45 days, it falls apart.

In my experience, overly restrictive password policies force users to choose passwords that are less secure and easier to remember.

Embedding special characters only makes it harder to remember correctly yet has little benefit. Your example is the same used in the xkcd where they explain this (except you've added an additional word at the beginning) so you've probably seen it already but I'll link it anyways. https://xkcd.com/936/

At work I constantly deal with people who can't remember passwords as short as 8 characters, you have to remember we're not representative of the average person.

For one specific site, no. But if you have 100-200 different passwords to remember, it's impossible for most people.