I feel a whole lot of problems would just go away if merge was abandoned. Thus every 'merge' would require a rebase (and subsequent deletion of the merged in br

I feel a whole lot of problems would just go away if merge was abandoned. Thus every 'merge' would require a rebase (and subsequent deletion of the merged in branch), and branches stay as branches. For example it then becomes obvious and inevitable that hotfixes must be on an independent maintenance branch (cherry picked in/out of the master if appropriate). There is no longer the proliferation of merged in feature branches - only features currently worked on (and yet to be rebased) would have a branch. There is no concept of release vs master vs dev as it is not possible to merge one into the other. Push/pull is fast forward or force rebase. Easy enough to write a wrapper around git to do this - I am tempted.