I think it is important to be clear. If someone is praising one thing above another, then it is entirely reasonable and not name calling to point out that the legacy protocol they are describing is 'awful'.
Seriously, you think 'awful' is name calling? No you do not. What is upsetting is that I do not value what I consider obsolete technology. There has always been an IETF faction that will argue that there are use cases for UUCP following the belief that other countries must follow the same technology progression as the West and deploy teletypes before people can move on to mobiles. It doesn't work that way.
FTP is pretty much the only protocol we use today where the most up to date version of the base RFC is still has a three digit number.
It is 32 years old. The original spec is 1980 which is the year they stopped making my MGB. Every time I work on that car, I say to myself 'they don't make them like this any more - thank goodness'.
Douglas Englebart's mother of all demos is still visionary even now. But if someone told me I had to use the code he showed in his demo today I would call it something much worse than awful.
If you are satisfied with the technology of 30 years ago, you probably won't be much help designing the technology for the next 30 years.
What was originally said was that FTP was superior to what has mostly replaced it. Which is nonsense. And yes, I know FTP very well as I rewrote the CERN Libwww implementation of FTP. It is less efficient than HTTP and less reliable. The only thing going for it is that HTTP does not support file upload to a directory, it only supports PUT and POST which are not quite the same (and yes, I know those, I was the first person to use them and spot the fact Tim's spec was utterly broken).
SSH and rsync are much better tools for file upload. Unfortunately, 1&1 does not support them to a Windows host and I don't plan to switch to their UNIX plan when I switch.
If people want to indulge in nostalgia about the good old days, fine. Just accept the fact that people are going to point out that they were not good at all.