> What bothers me is that there _is_ a process for resetting the question in case you've forgotten them, but that very process requires you to know them.

I'll be honest and tell you that I tend to forget the answer to these questions, simply because I don't want to use a simple question/answer set which could be guessed by someone else, but if I use a more elaborate answer, then I am bound to forget it after a while (essentially what happened to you), so clearly I also find this system painful, but I don't see how this could be improved. Unless, somehow a physically unique token (like an ID card, or a biometric feature) would be used instead of passwords, but not every device nowadays has the ability to handle them, and even them it raises the question of how it could be exploited, or how to handle the terrible case of one losing access to that token.