After some interaction (including assuring people), my impression of CAcert is much more negative than my impression with any of those big bad CAs everyone likes to complain about.

They are so far off this side of "sane" it's really not funny.

Are you able to elaborate? If not that's fine, but I just don't think paying for a cert makes it somehow better, so I liked the idea of CAcert. If I should be concerned about using them to secure personal sites (in this sense really only used by myself and a few friends who have the CA root cert) I'd be interested in knowing.