I think that apart from our understanding of usability/security tradeoffs everyone has a different idea of what is the right ratio. I think that for some kind of applications the right ratio can be so biased to store passwords in clear texts, or alternatively to set cookies to 2036.

I mean, once all we understand that storing things in cleartext is bad, doing it is a matter of design choice. I don't recommend this techniques for most applications, but for a few it can be a possible choice.