[charcircuit]

A simple change if you don't want to change it too much eg. moving away from passwords would be to use a sponge function instead of a hash and and squeeze out the same number of bits as the plaintext.

[tatersolid]

A cryptographic sponge function has a fixed capacity just like a the fixed state size of a cryptographic hash function…

[charcircuit]

Good point. How about splitting the password into chunks, then use a key streching algorthim on each chunk with difficulty tuned to be easier based off the total amount of chunks, and concatenating them.

[gpvos]

That sounds like the kind of homebrew crypto that one should never do in production. I'll stick to my boring but proven salted hashes, thanks.