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At least you don't ever really need to defragment ext4, unlike NTFS.

Can you solve all the problems in ext4 that NTFS claims to solve? No you cant. I am not saying either of the systems is perfect nor either of them is horrible. They are perfect for the use cases they are designed for. If somebody had a file system structure that was unusual(say lots of small files) to NTFS, I think it was his mistake in treating it as a black box.

The problem is that a large number of small files is a very common use case. Even Windows itself consists of lots of small files i.e. the source code and WinSxS.

It should handle general scenarios consistently. We've had a few minor versions of NTFS and now ReFS. ReFS should solve this but it doesn't as it's a copy and paste of the NTFS code initially rather than a complete reengineering effort.

You don't need to defragment NTFS either, defragmenter runs in the background. Defragmentation is more an issue of driver and not fs itself, I suspect ext4 does some form of defragmentation itself otherwise I can imagine edge cases that could ruin its day.

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