Are you taking the position that only auto-generated passwords can be secure? I'm trying to understand what conclusion to draw from your comment.

My point was that imposing length validations on passwords is not hard. Complexity validation, while more difficult, is also not exactly a novel problem.

I feel like I'm in bizarro-world with all these people telling me that sending a plaintext password via email is more secure than giving users the option to follow an authenticated link to create their own password because...users can't be trusted to choose good passwords?! Really?