I was certainly being a bit glib in my original post, but my point was that there are really simple solutions to this problem, and yet it keeps happening through a combination of IT staff incompetence and the established CAs making cert registration and renewal way more of a convoluted process than it needs to be.

This wouldn't have happened if they were using Let's Encrypt.

I hate to sound like a crusty old fart here (I'm 48, for what it's worth), but I feel like the younger generation who have only ever known disposable plastic, including many of the commenters here, don't realize it was never an inevitability, and that these companies, not the customers, chose to start packaging everything in single-use plastic.

In high school in the early '90s I worked in a grocery store. The only single-use plastic soda bottles that existed were 2-liter bottles. Aluminum cans were big, but most soda was sold in reusable glass bottles. You'd pay a deposit when you bought an 8-pack (16 oz glass bottles, in a cardboard tote), and you'd return the empty 8-pack to the store to get a refund of the deposit. We had a big bin at the front of the store where we'd drop the returns, and the delivery drivers from the soda companies would take the bottles away to be washed and reused.

This was normal, for decades, until it became *cheaper for the soda companies* to just start putting everything in single-use plastic.

See also: how all toys and household goods are now sold in impossible-to-open blister packs, mylar chip bags, etc. None of this existed in the '80s, and even though we didn't have recycling, we also didn't produce nearly as much single-use plastic waste as we do now.

As someone who has been developing custom CMSes at various jobs for over a decade, I've gotten to know what makes a CMS work (or not) quite well, and I've given most of the popular PHP-based open source CMSes (especially Drupal, Joomla, and MODx) more than a fair chance to impress me.

So far, I always eventually get frustrated with their arcane and idiosyncratic ways of doing things, which often require as much new specialized knowledge as learning a programming language in itself, and in the end they're never quite the right tool for the job anyway.

Now that I've been freelancing full-time for a year, I've come to a decision I'm satisfied with: as far as I'm concerned, there's only one pre-built CMS I've never been disappointed by, and believe it or not it's WordPress. But WordPress of course is not ideal for every site (it IS, however, ideal for lots of small- to medium-sized sites, not just blogs). Concurrently I've been developing my own custom CMS on CakePHP, tailored to the specific needs of my clients, and expanded as necessary as I've been adding more clients who are using it.

So, what it boils down to for me is this: assess the client's requirements, determine whether or not WordPress fits the bill, and either go with WP or use my own proprietary CakePHP-based CMS, expanding it as needed.

Maybe if one of the "big" open source CMSes were built on one of the equally "big" open source MVC frameworks, it would be worth investing the effort into getting to know inside and out, but just as I've made the decision to focus on PHP as my development language of choice, I've also had to decide to focus on one framework (CakePHP) and one CMS (my own) to know intimately and be able to build upon as needed.

It's not so much a matter of "staking my career" on it as it is of focusing on my strengths and building upon them. The whole point of freelancing is to get more bang for my buck in terms of productivity (and income) per hour worked. And so far, Drupal, Joomla, MODx, whatever... they just don't fit into that model for me.