Although I understand it was necessary to make accounts more secure, I have found from the people who tried to sign up through reading my posts or from my recommendation that the new random password generator has definitely been a problem for everybody. As you've said I was lucky to get in before this so I initially didn't understand why people were having a problem until I helped somebody to get signed up. Now I understand why some of my friends rang me to tell me their regret at taking so much time to log in immediately after registering, and why others gave up half way through after entering a digit wrong.
Keys make total sense to me and I think even non techy people can understand keys better than awfully long passwords where a 0 could be an O and an I could be an l or a 1!
The fact that Google already does this gives me hope for better security on steemit that could still be user-friendly.
Thanks @beanz.
Yeah, Google as well as Dropbox already support these kinds of keys, but I wish they would go further. Google actually only tends to ask me for my key when I am starting to use a new device, but they are convenient enough that I could authenticate much more often. This would mean there's less need to keep your computers fully secure as well.
You can see some companies which support U2F keys already here:
https://www.yubico.com/about/background/fido/