"The SMB protocol itself is pretty inefficient though, "
Well its more efficient than say NFS in terms of lower overhead.
"NFS is better as a transport "
In what way? SMB is more efficient and outperforms it. Especially on very high bandwidth and low latency links wherr its RDMA and multipath capabilities dont have amything similar in the NFS world.
"not the least of which are prohibitively expensive or complex implementations for Windows"
NFS is free under Windows - just add the feature.
"If Microsoft were to roll out decent ssh client and server integration "
Why would they want to deploy such a poorly designed amd firewall unfriendly legacy solution when they already have Powershell webaccess which has several advantages and far more security options?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
