I don't think it's all that trivial; whatever a program does when run without options should be a big clue towards the primary use case that it is designed to h

I don't think it's all that trivial; whatever a program does when run without options should be a big clue towards the primary use case that it is designed to handle or fulfill. In the case of curl, it writes to stdout; wget writes to a file. While the mechanics of each are the same, curl lends itself towards use in scripts while wget (at least in my experience) is better if you're kicking it off interactively. Also, wget has a very handy batch mode, where you can feed it a file containing nothing but a list of URLs and it will fetch each one. I am not familiar with a similar one for curl -- although admittedly you could do the same thing with a minimal wrapper script, that's a lot more keystrokes than "wget -i <file>".