Having known both tools for a long time now, I never realized there was a rivalry between them - I just figured they're each used differently. cURL is everywhere, so it's a good default. I use it when I want to see all of the output of a request - headers, response raw, etc. It's my de facto API testing tool. And before I even read the article, I assumed the answer was "Everything is a pipe". It sucks to have to memorize the flags, but it's worthwhile when you're actually debugging the web.