SMF currently does not appear to support FTP over SSL (FTPS) nor SFTP ("FTP over SSH").
More and more providers are rejecting plain-text authentication. They may even demand the data channel to be encrypted as well and thus reject any non-encrypted connection.
And some others, though this is more rare, don't support FTP nor FTPS but only SFTP.

With SMF only supporting plain-text FTP, tools such as the Package Manager and installer may not be able to perform certain tasks such as changing permissions (chmod).
It would be nice if we can at least get FTPS support. Having SFTP support as well would be nice.
Hence this feature request. :)