Passphrase or no passphrase, it seems to me the important take-away should be to do the work to know what the hell you're doing. Everyone should be using some form of Testnet to test-drive the entire bitcoin ecosystem over and over until they get it. (if only some form of Testnet were more normalized across wallet software. Unfortunately, for those that do offer a Testnet experience, too many of them don't appear to take their implementation of it seriously).