@tfa I can’t speak for the cli devs, but I guess the way I would look at it is that the safe-cli tool is a swiss army tool for doing a whole bunch of safe network related things, of which a subset of those are file related things. So it really just aims to support the basics of copying… kind of like scp does – plus a basic sync command. And that may be enough for a minimum viable product/experience.
rsync otoh is more of a specialty tool for bi-directional syncing/mirroring with a unique syncing algo and lots of options around that. Someone else could start a safe-rsync program/project at any time that specializes in these aspects.
Or maybe full rsync capability will make it into safe-cli. dunno. I’m just saying there are other paths that can be taken for same/similar result.