Git is a tool that asks the user to engage from the perspective of the internals of the tool. In order to understand what is happening in git, you need to under

Git is a tool that asks the user to engage from the perspective of the internals of the tool. In order to understand what is happening in git, you need to understand how changes move through the system. There's a good reason for this! Git is really worried about automatically doing something you don't want and losing data or mangling code. One way to deal with that is to teach users how many decisions git is making, and then if there's any doubt git will refuse to make a choice and tell the user to sort it out. The approach is both sensible and demands a great deal from individual users. Especially users who are newer to the system and, in their inexperience, more likely to get into bad states and be uncertain about how to get out. I suspect that, on a practical level, more changes are lost by users needing to reset --hard because they don't know what else to do than git would use by making a few more choices. But there is value in the idea that when that data is lost its the user who chooses to lose it! I don't want to lose that. I think there's a huge hunger for a more automatic DVCS, one that offers fewer options and makes more choices for you. There are obviously a lot of other options out there at various stages of development and I have no idea what they are like because, like many experienced programmers, I'm quite comfortable with git!