I think that extensions are sort of badly named in mercurial, but you're making them out to be much more difficult to work with/install than they actually are.

I think that extensions are sort of badly named in mercurial, but you're making them out to be much more difficult to work with/install than they actually are. Mercurial ships with a bunch of features ("extensions") turned off by default so that beginner users aren't confused with stuff before they're ready. Turning the bookmark extension on is as easy as putting "bookmarks=" in your ~/.hgrc file. So the bookmark branching model, which is equivalent to the git branching model and something I use every day, is a built-in part of mercurial. You just have to enable it to work that way. The "transplant" extension (similar to cherry picking in git) also comes with mercurial and is just a one liner in a config file to enable.