> You're right that it's not a good idea for generalists to pick up Noise and go to town with it. Noise isn't misuse-proof.

Nor is SSL. Couldn't an opinionated SSL library (supporting exactly one protocol version, one cipher only, etc) provide the same simplicity of use while remaining interoperable and reusing an already-validated protocol?

Simplicity of use isn't the only benefit they get from Noise Pipes; they also get increased security, in a couple of important ways.

It's not the choice I would have made, but I am not as good as Moxie or Trevor.

FYI there is an RFC (currently a draft) for a suite of parameters considered secure for some time, ie some kind of LTS: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gutmann-tls-lts-02

The idea is more or less what you want, hardcode some known-good configuration for servers that can't or won't be upgraded every other month.

That appears to not fully interoperate with regular TLS implementations, and does not require the use of the most popular secure ciphersuite ECDHE_RSA_AESGCM. If they need to make changes to make it secure, define an extension and say this profile makes the extension mandatory (like MAC-then-encrypt), but don't just change the protocol.

This is less a practical draft and more a political statement about the author's dislike for TLS 1.3. In particular, it makes extensive modifications to the TLS protocol itself (it doesn't merely propose a limited set of safe parameters).