Blog-posts about password authentication usually talk about encrypting passwords in your database, with the understanding that the user's password will be sent verbatim to the server (possibly over an encrypted transport). The usual alternative is digest authentication, where the verbatim password doesn't go over the network, but the server needs to store the plaintext password on disk, which is even worse.

However, SCRAM authentication (defined in RFC5802) does not pass a verbatim password over the network, does not require a verbatim password stored on the server, or even an unsalted hash. It seems like it ought to be the best possible authentication scheme for all situations - over plaintext, over TLS, whatever. Why isn't it used more heavily? Why isn't it even mentioned in "how to store passwords" threads?