Why are we moving to HTTP2.0 otherwise? For a 5 percent increase in speed? The big selling point of HTTP2.0 from my perspective was the "always-on encryption".
I for one used to be thinking like that. I had my A4 paper with all my computers fingerprint in my pocket and painstakingly checked it every time I was at a new computer. In my university, studying in the computer security program, I think I was the single person checking fingerprints. Not even the system administrators did it.
I guess in practice, ssh today is nothing more than cosmetic compared to telnet.
I don't understand the comparison you're trying to make between SSH and a proposal to transparently MITM a protocol that is designed to be transparently MITM'd. Unless your gripe is that we shouldn't have protocols like that to begin with, in which case I agree, but you should direct your angst to the people who proposed HTTP/2.0 OE, not this proposal.
In return for using ssh over telnet, I get security against any passive attack and attacks past first login. Thus the functionality is on a technical basis superior to telnet (except if you use IPsec, then telnet is better than SSH).
A personal question: when you install a new personal laptop or server, do you check the fingerprints of every ssh connection? Do you prune the CA list and remove any entry that you personally can't vouch the trustfulness of? This is after all what SSL require of each user, so it would be interesting to know if a founder of an software security company do this to his own personal equipment.
Sadly he now seems to have changed his mind about the validity of this approach, mostly because users and devs alike dislike complexity in their decision process as to what is secure and what is merely obscured.