Crap driver? It's not a 'driver', and smb has been natively supported for at least 8-10 years. It hasn't sucked in a looong time either. In fact recent OS versions have defaulted to smb v2 for file sharing.
I believe when they flipped the switch to default to SMB it was actually to SMB 3 in 10.10.
Anecdotally, I'd always found AFP in the Tiger and Leopard days to be faster than whichever version of SMB support was included at the time. Now I use the default SMB3 and it seems that 802.11ac and gigabit are bottlenecks (of course its 10 years later in the times of SSD's as well)
And it wasn't just anecdotally faster; I worked for a storage company specializing in Mac workflows and AFP was empirically several times faster, especially on 1GbE and 10GbE networks. This was in part due to Apple ditching Samba in Lion/10.7 (http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_10...) over GPL concerns and replaced it with their own shitty, incomplete implementation, which they didn't get up to Samba's standards until 10.10.
I remember this being excruciating since customers had to either buy a third-party SMB implementation like DAVE to get any value out of 10GbE connections, or hope that the applications they wanted to use over the network supported AFP.
