Even after your explanation, the name "reset" and "--mixed" make no sense to me. "reset" is not indicative of what's being reset. "--mixed" is almost meaningle

Even after your explanation, the name "reset" and "--mixed" make no sense to me. "reset" is not indicative of what's being reset. "--mixed" is almost meaningless. "--soft" and "--hard" are also mostly meaningless. I'm OK with having a low-level primitive like "reset" that doesn't have a simple meaning so cannot have a meaningful name. But then, it should be wrapped with meaningful commands such as "moveto" with flags to avoid touching index or working tree, and "unadd" on top of "reset". Then, I don't think anyone would ever use reset directly, so it would probably be phased out :-)