Compelling reasons to switch ?

I experienced a very "interesting" bug that might well give a compelling reason for a more robust NTFS implementation: A graduate student of mine was doing, fairly recently, a parameter study of some numerical modeling problem. He was controlling the actual simulation (some Fortran code) from a Python script that would first generate a working directory with a deep path, each of the many parameters encoding one level of subdirectories with the actual parameter value going into the directory name. He was running all of this on a mildly beefy departmental compute server, dumping the output onto a big USB hard drive which, no surprise, came formatted with NTFS. For the analysis, he plugged in the hard drive into his laptop and used different Python scripts to read a single data point from each of the simulations for his study. Both server and laptop had some recent Ubuntu, so presumably used ntfs-3g.

Now it turned out that his graphs had strange outliers. On closer inspection, the "outliers" were actually at different locations for different runs of the script, while the data on disk was completely unchanged. Excluding all other rational explanations and given that the nesting of directories was pretty deep and I was not sure that all characters used where actually legal and unambiguous on NTFS, I concluded that this might be a filesystem issue, with the filesystem randomly and quietly mixing up paths. So I advised to simply reformat the drive in ext4 and recompute everything. Immediately, the "outliers" were gone.

I still think we were extremely lucky that ntfs-3g's path resolution was wrong in a non-deterministic fashion, otherwise the problem space would have been much larger and we would likely not have suspected the filesystem as the culprit. But from this experience, I am very reluctant to touch NTFS from Linux in any way.