The real problem with NFS is that NFSv3 is easy to implement but insecure and has scalability issues (e.g. users can be in no more than 16 secondary groups) whi

The real problem with NFS is that NFSv3 is easy to implement but insecure and has scalability issues (e.g. users can be in no more than 16 secondary groups) while NFSv4 is complicated and requires a complete Kerberos infrastructure (which is more complicated than rocket science!) to utilize in a way that works around the limitations of NFSv3. There's much better network file systems but because of many factors (boat/complexity being the biggest) their adoption is minimal. Once you move beyond single-user/simple read/write permissions there's really no easy to avoid complexity. It's just the nature of the beast that is sharing files over the network in a way that appears native to the user.