Throughout the years my employers have reinstalled servers and consequently changed host keys. I believe many users just accept the new key without realizing what they might get themselves into.

Ideally your organization should keep updated (public) host keys somewhere, say on some https-protected website so you can double check yourself. How common is this?

(I mainly use ssh for interactive/tunneling use, but with a bit of bad luck the host key would change just in time for scp. BTW, don't rsync/unison use scp sometimes?)