I am very interested to see what people's answers are for this, because I pine for a version control system designed for the twists and turns of experimental in

I am very interested to see what people's answers are for this, because I pine for a version control system designed for the twists and turns of experimental investigation rather than the needs of engineering implementation. I very much suspect that some sort of structured approach to one's commit messages might be key, and a careful mapping of DAG concepts to experimental ones--branching as the modification of an independent variable, with a base commit selected as the control point of comparison? Would one want to be able to rebase in order to compare against a different point? What would the semantics of merges represent?