It did fine iff you had a good Kermit implementation at the BBS. Most used the most basic possible version of the protocol, which was godawfully slow, but I did some dialup at the end of the BBS era (93-95) where someone showed me how to use Kermit properly with large packets and sliding windows. It was every bit as fast as Zmodem, though I don’t recall if it supported transfer resuming.
I never used the translation features, though I can think of one particular summer where that would have been very useful (had a 7E1 connection - I got files to my PC by uuencoding to screen, saving the buffer contents to my PC, and then uudecoding them locally).
A good example of the defaults being incredibly important to any application. If your defaults are super slow then most people are going to come away with the impression that your application is slow.
FTP is another great example where people got the impression that it was prone to corrupting transfers because the default setting was to corrupt binary transfers.
