imcritic parent
I have the opposite opinion and experience: a simple file copy is pretty trivial with scp, but with rsync - it's a goddamn lottery. Too many options, too many possible modes and thus I am never sure about the outcome meeting my expectations.
You have to figure the correct options only once, then you should use forever the same alias or script for copying.
For instance, I always use this:
ALIAS='/usr/bin/rsync --archive --xattrs --acls --hard-links --progress --rsh="ssh -p PORT -l USER"'
In decades of working with computers, I have never wanted to make any other kind of copies except exact copies, so I never use the default options of cp, scp, rsync etc., but I always use the same aliases for them, with the options needed for exact copies.