> Still looking for a way to make sftp/scp work fast.

Making it fast while still using it, not sure. But I can share an alternative, since a friend had the same issue and this was a literally ten times faster for a lot of small files (in the order of 30 minutes instead of 5 hours):

    cd path/to/target/location
    ssh user@target 'tar c /tmp/example' | tar x

Quick guide to tar, since it's super simple:

    c for compress
    x for extract
    f for file (since we send it to stdout / read from stdin, I don't use the f option)
    v for verbosity (not sure if that works on the remote side)
    z for zlib compression (ssh can do compression already, so also unused here)
    t for testing (reading) an archive without extracting it ("tar tv <your.tar" will show you the contents, it's almost like real TV!)

That's all I've ever needed.

So what this will do is run "tar create <directory>" on the remote system and, tar being a classic tool, it'll just output that binary archive data to stdout since you didn't specify a file ("tar cf your.tar <directory>"). On the receiving side, you pipe it to another tar command that reads from stdin (since, again, no file was specified) and extracts the files from the incoming data stream.