I don't believe the problems with visualization of merge commits are insurmountable. Nearly all the command line tools (other than, really notably, bisect) allo

I don't believe the problems with visualization of merge commits are insurmountable. Nearly all the command line tools (other than, really notably, bisect) allow a --first-parent flag that makes navigating them much simpler. Even gitk supports this mode, so doing it in a gui is also possible. In terms of the preservation of useful information, I vastly prefer the merge tree. And using merge trees appropriately and never using merge trees at all are both matters of discipline.