Pointless Password Pedantry

Nobody trusts me, and nobody can agree on what the best way of making me trustworthy is.

This is the sense that I get from password form schemes, when I'm signing up for new services. I don't know about you, but I have literally tens of passwords to remember, and so, sensibly, I have devised a personal algorithm to generate passwords in different situations, rather than doing something deeply insecure like writing them down in a text file on my desktop (yes, people really do do this, even with system root passwords!).

Without giving away too much, my password algorithm allows me to domain or namespace my passwords both in terms of the service they are for, and the context they are being used in. Further, there is a feedback loop between these two components which explains how to modify the password further in a way which is not possible to predict in advance, and upon which a further set of standard modifications is then applied. The result: easy to reconstruct without the aid of memory but totally unguessable passwords. They include alphanumeric characters, special characters and both capital and lower case letters. They are a paragon of good password design.

So why oh why oh why do different services have such wildly different notions of "good" passwords. Let me give you some examples. Sourceforge don't permit special characters in their passwords! eBuyer don't permit passwords of more than 20 characters (the passwords that my algorithm generates can be extremely long, adding to their security). My online bank requires 2 digits and 2 capital letters, and disallows certain special characters. So I still have to remember which services require which variations on the algorithm, and I'm constantly having to make new adjustments to it. The problem is, that many services conflict with their requirements: you MUST have special characters, you MUST NOT have special characters. How's a security conscious person going to win? I suppose I could start writing my passwords down in a plain text file on my desktop ...

Why don't these systems just implement something like:

http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php

and reject passwords that come out at less than "Reasonable"?