Part of git's success might be due to its initial association with Linus. Which I would find mildly ironic, because Linus initially was one of the last promine

Part of git's success might be due to its initial association with Linus. Which I would find mildly ironic, because Linus initially was one of the last prominent holdouts against version control systems, and then made (in my opinion) a very ill-conceived decision to go with a commercial version control system that effectively made it harder for non-prominent, non-paying developers to contribute. So when he decided to build his own version control system, I'd say it was not a foregone conclusion that he was a particularly qualified expert in the field. But in retrospect, the technical architecture underlying git has held up well (the UI maybe not so much).