The consensus seems to be Bitcoin-QT wallet and paper wallets.  

Long-time trusted exchanges would be the next safest (but beware of people having trouble getting things out of Mt. Gox).

And don't use fly-by-night online wallets by small developers (such as Inputs.IO), as these are almost always "hacked" eventually.  (Who knows if they just take all the coins?)

And whatever you do, don't make a "brain wallet".

Yes.

No.

Bitcoin-Qt has numerous problems, such as random key generation which invalidates your backups after every 100 transactions, and no support for cold storage. Every time you spend your bitcoins with Bitcoin-Qt you potentially expose your private keys to malware on your PC.

I'm very sure there is support for cold storage wen using bitcoin-qt, and you don't need the -qt at all. I take that you know about raw transactions, signing, and so on ?

Raw transactions are the last thing anyone should be recommending to non-experts.

As far as regular users are concerned, Bitcoin-Qt doesn't support offline transactions.

Does Armory sit on top of Bitcoind (ie RPC), or does Armory include a re-write of the Bitcoin crypto fundamentals?

Are there any concerns with Armory primarily being developed by a single person?

please explain.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change

Bitcoin-Qt generates 100 addresses at a time and stores them in wallet.dat. After you've performed 100 interactions (spend or receipts of coins), it generates a new batch.

When this happens, your old wallet.dat backup is no longer sufficient because it does not contain the new keys.

Deterministic wallets, such as Armory, do not have this problem.

Please tell me you don't have anything to do with software development. Your ideas on end-user usability are a danger to yourself and others.

Can you keep your baseless opinions to yourself ?

So you think Armory is user friendly ? This is a brand new category of user friendliness to me, as it requires more than 8gb of ram to run, older and not so cheap computers that can be used for actual safe cold storage are immediately ruled out. Can you be clear why you think I'm a danger to myself ? Making backups more often is bad ? Oh dear. Do you create keys for cold storage in online computers ? Oh dear.

That is not paranoid at all, it should be the default operation mode for all the bitcoin users. Encrypting the wallet is the basic stuff and a must. Truecrypt partition complements that well, good reminder.