I'm also amazed that the coffee shop use-case has remained a terrible, frustrating hack (no way to encrypt without a password and no formal support for EULA/login screen). Like you, I figured in the 20 years since 802.11 they'd consider it a use-case worthy of first-party support--especially since every 3 or 4 years there's a new standard everyone adopts (a, c, g, n, and ac).

I continue to be astonished there is no support for passwordless encryption (open hotspots with no password needed to connect, but with some sort of automatically-negotiated encryption). Dropping encryption should not be required for a good user experience on open hotspots.

I spent 30 min this morning looking for this link (and failed)! Glad you posted it again :-)