I also use SFTP on a daily basis for managing Linux and Mac OS X servers and
although this protocol was not so "polished" in the past, now it's very stable and
most FTP clients support it flawlessly.

There are 2 major drawbacks though:

1). You need to create a regular account (home or user directory, etc.) on the
system to create a login and password for SFTP access. This is not great if you
want to give ONLY SFTP access to someone, without giving them SSH access
and a shell account, home directory, etc.
With FTP servers, you can create as many virtual users as you want, without
creating normal accounts on the server.

2). There is no native way to have an SFTP server on a Windows machine.


I think that it is really annoying that in 2006 we still do not have an easy to use
universal secure transfer protocol:
- FTP sucks with the gazzillion ports that need to be open, there is no encryption
- SFTP has a very limited use
- FTP with SSL is complicated to set up
- same for WebDAV
- HTTPS is not good for big transfers
- AFP or SMB are not well suited for web use....