> Since Apple has support SMB for a long time, and actually made it the default
  > protocol in 10.9, is there much need for AFP?

Time machine backups still require afp I believe -- unless you use the "TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes" option.

Performance of SMB on Mac is only about half of AFP/NFS, and NFS is more complex to manage from an authorization/user management point of view in a Mac environment.

I'm running AFP on FreeNAS. I also have SMB setup.

I'm using OSX 10.9.4, and I've seen better performance over AFP than with SMB.

So yes, it'd be nice to have AFP support.

AFP is generally faster than SMB and SMB2, but SMB3 should be faster than AFP. YMMV of course.