It is dire. I am not a unity dev but I work with the other side of helping them with server side stuff and unity provides pretty much no help with this. It's roll your own http parsing and cookie handling library land.
Shouldn't this mostly be handled by Mono? I was similarly surprised by the amount of work it took to get some requests going in a Unity/C# project about 2 years ago.
As I say, I am not a unity dev, but just guessing from what little I know about it, I would say that mono is merely a language runtime that still depends on the underlying platform for things such as networking. Unity, which allows C# and Javascript, needs to have the same API for both languages, which is ultimately implemented via npapi, activeX or pnaci, or you know, the other platforms it runs on. So far as I know, mono doesn't have networking libraries for all those different apis.
