Circle is not complete until I see a suggestion on how you can replace iCloud with mashup scripting of sftp/rsync and cronjobs.

No, the circle is not complete until an article is posted about how a 15 year old cobbled together a website/app combo that did it automatically and grew to a few million users overnight; Apple hired the kid, killed the app, and wrote a new layer of signed security into iOS that would prevent anything like that from working again; and that layer was responsible for the last iCloud outage because somebody at Apple accidentally let a certificate expire.

Those can't replace iCloud because they are free. Write the sftp/rsync script and then throw money in the garbage to accurately replace iCloud.

s/iCloud/Dropbox/g

Here on HN, mentioning Dropbox makes the circle complete.