Best practices to generate a long and complex password?

[MrWonderful]

I would likely do something like that as well, so I don't feel like you're doing it wrong at all.
You could maybe do it in steps, like for the first run do 0 starting special chars, then 1, 2, 3 (instead of doing a single run with the whole keyspace).

Thank you for the input. I'm surprised that they aren't many replies, so I presume that what I'm doing is indeed very much correct!