> This abets a hugely widespread misunderstanding about the security of crypto. You could in fact invent your own block cipher core, and if you dropped it into Keyczar or cryptlib's high level library be more secure than people using AES-256 directly via OpenSSL.

No.

Someone who knew their way around cryptography algorithms could do that. I can't. This is good advice for someone who isn't a security expert. (Edit: With my level of crypto knowledge, I don't even know how to evaluate whether your claim bears any relationship to reality.)

(Yes. I would like to remedy that. I'm working on it, slowly.)