Deprecation of scp protocol and improving sftp client

[Michael Stone]

The fundamental problem is that the command line syntax of sftp is not 
great. There's no fundamental reason that can't be fixed, without even 
changing the existing sftp protocol. But as long as scp (and rsync) 
exist the motivation to actually make the sftp command line tool nicer 
is so low that even though people have talked about it for 20 years, it 
hasn't happened yet. (And even though it would require orders of 
magnitude less effort than has been expended complaining about sftp & 
scp over the last 20 years...)

I don't see an obvious way forward until someone decides to actually 
make the sftp client nicer to use. (No need to even talk about it: just 
show up with a finished version that does what scp does!)