I'm not aware of any experts who like individual certificate authorities. Are there some that I'm missing?
I think perhaps what you mean to say is that experts like the x509 PKI. Which again, isn't quite true. You'll find plenty of experts pointing out that major parts of x509 and the PKI ecosystem, and of TLS and HTTPS, are garbage: ASN.1 parsing is a trashfire, protocol/cipher negotiation has had numerous critical flaws, things like compression have allowed traffic to be decrypted.
What I think is more accurate to say is that experts have invested heavily in finding ways to augment web infrastructure to remove broad categories of these, and the result is a generally recommendable system. This includes things like moving to TLS 1.3, enforcing that CAs participate in Cert Transparency logs, delisting CAs that misbehave, and adjusting browser behavior to avoid security pitfalls like mixed content that compromise users.
The problem with doing that for GPG is partly that its fundamental nature is not well aligned with making those kinds of changes, and partly that (as we see in the original post) GnuPG is resistant to making changes that would leave behind users of insecure codepaths and cryptography.
I think perhaps what you mean to say is that experts like the x509 PKI. Which again, isn't quite true. You'll find plenty of experts pointing out that major parts of x509 and the PKI ecosystem, and of TLS and HTTPS, are garbage: ASN.1 parsing is a trashfire, protocol/cipher negotiation has had numerous critical flaws, things like compression have allowed traffic to be decrypted.
What I think is more accurate to say is that experts have invested heavily in finding ways to augment web infrastructure to remove broad categories of these, and the result is a generally recommendable system. This includes things like moving to TLS 1.3, enforcing that CAs participate in Cert Transparency logs, delisting CAs that misbehave, and adjusting browser behavior to avoid security pitfalls like mixed content that compromise users.
The problem with doing that for GPG is partly that its fundamental nature is not well aligned with making those kinds of changes, and partly that (as we see in the original post) GnuPG is resistant to making changes that would leave behind users of insecure codepaths and cryptography.