To be honest it's been quite a while, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't recall the specifics, but rdp was essentially "I start daemon, I run rdp [dst]", and it works", whereas Xorg involved a lot more mucking about with commands and reading manpages and whatnot.

I will admit that in part this was just my ignorance; I just used it to access my desktop on occasion from my laptop on the sofa and didn't really want to spend a lot of time on it. rdp was "it works out of the box effort-free and I can move on with my life" and X11 wasn't. Maybe I just didn't RTFM hard enough, but I didn't have to RTF anything for rdp, so...

I use samba/SMB for similar reasons by the way; recently I wanted to setup a network drive (for the first time in about 10 years) and samba provided a much smoother "just works" type of experience than NFS. Sometimes I find the old-type Unix stuff a bit painful, especially for the "just want to get shit done" type of workflow (I did use NFS extensively with FreeBSD and NetBSD back in the day, but it seems I've forgotten almost everything).