Requiring a password for a hardware key doesn't add much to the key already being in your pocket or locked in your house/office. It helps against an attack that's specifically targeting you as a person but it's basically just a nuisance for you when considering generalized account attacks.

Not really part of what you said but this just caught my attention and I thought I'd ponder about it in public a bit.

We used to think that

> It helps against an attack that's specifically targeting you

would be sufficient, because, like who cares about little old me? But in the era of API intelligence, setting up a specific agent to target every person seems automatable.

If all that was missing before was a sufficiently-motivated attacker who would learn about you and your patterns, and that couldn't scale because we didn't have enough dedicated bad guys, that seems like it's a bout to change pretty quick.