For me, I SFTP from 5 locations around the globe daily. I could build a complex system to manage the transfers.. but why, when it just works for our use case.
No, that's FTPS. FTPS wraps FTP in TLS; SFTP is a protocol in the SSH protocol that can transfer files and that happens to implement an FTP-like interface.
The only difference is the security transport / authentication, otherwise if functions the exact same way.
The original RFC for SFTP was written to actually be a simpler version of FTP. While v3 seems to be the standard and the final RFC was never ratified, SFTP is still FTP.
Are you perhaps referring to FTPS, which is FTP with SSL/TLS added? SFTP is very, very different from FTP.
Note that SFTP is not a protocol for security transport / authentication. It doesn't do that. It assumes that you've already secured/authorized the channel with SSH. See section 1 of the RFC.
Unfortunately SFTP isn't a good replacement when speed is a concern, anything running over OpenSSH will have its bandwidth limited by the fixed window size. I long for the day when HPN-SSH replaces OpenSSH everywhere.
Most of our transfers are limited by our backbone, but because we chunk files we're able to do multiple concurrent transfers and max out traffic as best we can. We mostly have 10g links, but anything over that tends to get into serious diminishing returns in value/performance.