Firstly, my advice is strictly that ‘advice’. You can either take it or leave it. The choice is yours.
Secondly, even if you are aware of the risks and implications, there are many others reading these posts that are not. A few minutes browsing through these forums will show you that there are numerous individuals attempting to administer SME servers with very little background, knowledge or experience to do so. The comments I made were aimed at those novices in a hope that they will take the time to become better informed before jumping into something that can get them into deep trouble.
Thirdly, SME is not really designed to be used as a public hosting server. So that is not a very fair comparison.
Fourthly, there are much better and secure methods to work remotely with the SME file system than insecure FTP. SSH being my preferred method.
Hopefully I haven’t offended you or anyone else because that surely is not my intention.