To add something vaguely original: the people who created it are brilliant
Yes. HTTP is good stuff
It's not the worst quick hack protocol out there, but like most of the web it really wasn't designed for what it's actually used for today. There's lots of reasons not to use HTTP, like the overhead it adds to small requests, the complexity added by grafting on support for efficient transfers (i.e., compression and binary data), and the lack of any reasonable support for non-ASCII headers.