Unfortunately, I think you have to learn this way because everyone who came before you also did. So not only is the porcelain oriented towards this understandin

Unfortunately, I think you have to learn this way because everyone who came before you also did. So not only is the porcelain oriented towards this understanding, but so are people's existing repositories and workflows. People regularly use the limited subset of git that Github permits without learning how it works internally. If only the 'edit this file' button were powerful enough to do actual work... It isn't, and that's the other problem: internals knowledge actually helps you do day-to-day versioning tasks. The reality is that one day two developers will submit PRs that conflict, and you'll have to find a way to merge them both, and knowing how rebasing works inside absolutely helps you. The analogy is more MSWord style-stacking than manipulating ropes directly, because Git does manage to completely hide some of its guts. (Object storage, compression, transfer come to mind.)