yggdrasil

Heartily second the idea of Persona being re-rolled as classic login replacement, with emphasis on standardizing login best practices, such as password strength, password format disclosure, input naming that plays nicely with other password management systems, etc. The sheer amount of cruft and non-standardization involved with basic site login actively discourages user involvement. If Persona solved that unobtrusively, they would be adopted and evangelized all over the land.

Exactly. The cardinal rule of competent software development is that you don't test quality into the software. The root causes were requirements churn, split development, and no project coordinator. Those would be nearly insurmountable on an average size project but were hopeless on this project. It's a marvel they were able to stabilize it to the point it's at.