Not only are you wrong, I had the opposite experience - whether was all well and good for downloading pages, but it fell over for making e.g. authenticated POST

Not only are you wrong, I had the opposite experience - whether was all well and good for downloading pages, but it fell over for making e.g. authenticated POST requests. I think that might be possible now/have gotten better, but wget has always been too restrained for me. I am in agreement that wget has "sane" defaults i.e. it acts like a bot or web crawler, or basic browser. Curl has always been easier to get things done with, though. At least in the land of http requests.