Salting and hashing isn't going to help you much if you're prone to using one-character passwords. Unfortunately, people will use one-character passwords if they are allowed to, so systems should require strong passwords to protect users.
That's not to say there aren't problems with password restrictions, but they are mostly at the other end of the spectrum. For example, I have seen far too many systems requiring that passwords must be no longer than ten characters long, or only allowing a very small subset of characters.
That's not to say there aren't problems with password restrictions, but they are mostly at the other end of the spectrum. For example, I have seen far too many systems requiring that passwords must be no longer than ten characters long, or only allowing a very small subset of characters.