It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all, for instance, or for a developer to believe they've committed work to a shared branch when in fact it's a p

It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all, for instance, or for a developer to believe they've committed work to a shared branch when in fact it's a private one (and therefore leave the rest of the team hanging.) I've never ever found myself on "no branch", and in cases where I've commited a bunch of code to a non-shared branch, I can easily push my branch to origin and make it shared. Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git: arguments that derive from the fact that it's a DVCS, and therefore apply to other (IMO better) tools, or "community acceptance" (a la github, Rails) which I find frustrating and circular. I use Git for exactly those reasons. Why wouldn't I use the DVCS the rest of the community uses? Why would I use, for example, Mercurial or Fossil over git? I think you missed the third argument in support of Git: "I like it and it works well for what I do."