Your post hit a lot of notes I agree with. Programming dogma doesn't make a lick of sense sometimes. I wonder if the "don't implement cryptography yourself" rule is disingenuous, and really about not necessitating more work from our governmental APTs to get peepholes into everything. I'm also amazed at how often people cry premature optimization when there's potential to reduce hardware cost by orders of magnitude by not writing slow, memory hungry junk by default.