The character soup is fine. The problem is that people stop after that. Want security? Here, a bucket of character soup! Good luck!
There's nothing stopping library authors from choosing good defaults for well defined use cases. My beef is that mostly this isn't done, and often neither does documentation about security. That's what I like about this "Copenhagen Book": it gets this right. It starts with the use case, and then goes down to clear recommendations on how to combine which crypto primitives. Most resources take it the other way around, they start with explaining the crypto primitives in hard to understand terms and then if you're very lucky, tell you what pitfalls to avoid, and mostly never even make it to the use case at all.
There's nothing stopping library authors from choosing good defaults for well defined use cases. My beef is that mostly this isn't done, and often neither does documentation about security. That's what I like about this "Copenhagen Book": it gets this right. It starts with the use case, and then goes down to clear recommendations on how to combine which crypto primitives. Most resources take it the other way around, they start with explaining the crypto primitives in hard to understand terms and then if you're very lucky, tell you what pitfalls to avoid, and mostly never even make it to the use case at all.