To me, it's a deficiency in the lack of session management for SSH. All that SSH gives me is a two-way pipe to the other server's I/O. That's simple and elegant, but why does it create a new pipe every time? It's connection-oriented, which is a concept that hasn't seen any innovation since the 1970s.

My preferred innovation here would be a local shell that had remote access. Rather than pipe I/O to the remote shell, give me a local shell which happens to execute its verbs on the remote machine, and let the remote file system simply be a volume. All my session state (including command history) can be local, there's no need to keep that on the remote host. A remote host is just another context.

I believe Plan 9 tried something similar, but very few people have picked up on its innovations.