(I'm speaking about authenticated connections. For anonymous access - which should be read-only anyway - you're usually better off using HTTP anyway)
So in that case, at least, I was very glad FTP(S) was still around.
FTP does have some advantages, but HTTP has more advanced support for resuming connections, virtual hosting, better compression, and persistent connections, to name a few.
I bet if we had used FTP instead of HTTP for serving HTML right from the start, FTP would today have all of the same extensions and the same people would argue for it being too bloated :) (HTTP started as pretty minimalistic protocol back in the day)
I often find the discrepancy between what HTTP has originally been designed for (serving static HTML pages) and all the different things it's being used for today highly amusing. Yes, some of todays applications for HTTP border on abuse, but its versatility (combined with its simplicity) fascinates me.
The two success factors of http are statelessness and fixed verbs.
http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/732/170/796...
HTTP is quite a good protocol. Simple, extensible to a sane extent, but not overly extensible (XMPP i'm thinking about you). HTTP is not accidentally successful. FTP is a bad joke. (stateful. binary mode, 7 bit by default. uses multiple connections (unless in passive mode))
Minimal implementations of HTTP (and I'm strictly talking about the transport protocol, not about HTML, JS, ...) is dead simple and relatively easy to implement.
Of course there's a ton of extensions (gzip compression, keepalive, chunks, websockets, ...), but if you simply need to 'add HTTP' to one of your projects (and for some reason none of the existing libraries can be used) it shouldn't take too many lines of code until you can serve a simple 'hello world' site.
On top of all that, it's dead simple to put any one of the many existing reverse proxies/load balancers in front of your custom HTTP server to add load balancing, authentication, rate limiting (and all of those can be done in a standard way)
Furthermore, HTTP has the huge advantage of being readily available on pretty much every piece of hardware that has even the slightest idea of networking. Any new technology would have to fight a steep uphill battle to convince existing users to switch.
Have I mentioned that it's standardized and open?