>> There is currently only one free cert provider, if there are ever issues with it, your users will see a scary error message
> Isn't this the point?
The point is to secure the communication between client and server, and warn/stop it, if it is insecure (MITM et al.). It is counter-productive to stop the communication because an unrelated party (CA) is having issues.
The CA is not an unrelated party. If the client cannot verify the validity of the cert against the CA, then it should throw up a warning message. If the server cannot get a cert signed by the CA, then it too should throw up a warning message, because it does not have the trust of clients by itself.
