You know, in a fantasy world where standards of comparable complexity have equally good implementations I would much rather use Telnet and FTP over TLS (1.3) than SSH and SFTP. For all that they show their age they just seem to me to be cleaner designs.

I will have to concede, though, that FTP servers in the real world are surprisingly awful. Even the supposedly easy task of spinning up an anonymous read-only FTP server to serve the current directory for five minutes, all permissions and security be damned, is annoyingly non-trivial.

(Unrelated to that awfulness, does anyone know how to get active FTP to pass through SLIRP networking on Qemu?)