[NavinF]

> MD5's weaknesses are easily described, and importantly, it is still (second) preimage resistant

Most devs have no idea what that means, but most devs still need to use hash functions. They need to use primitives that match their mental model of a hash function. Said model is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_oracle

The usual answer here is "don't roll your own crypto", but in practice abstinence-only cryptography education doesn't work.