> There do exist experienced PHP devs who would do password storage the right way but PHP up until now neither made it easy nor encourage these practices as they relate to passwords.

As much as I welcome these features, I don't think that's true. PHP has made it extremely easy to use the core operating system's hashing features.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.crypt.php

And after 5.3, even if for whatever reason your operating system is lacking, they were built in for convenience.