I think one thing that helped git early on was that its concept of branches were just really convenient. For me I'd say it's that git doesn't fit my mental mod

I think one thing that helped git early on was that its concept of branches were just really convenient. For me I'd say it's that git doesn't fit my mental model and Mercurial does - it's that mercurial gave me a smaller mental model that (at least back when I used it heavily) allowed me to do what I needed. Even as a fairly experienced and advanced Git user, Git requires me to keep more state in the head and at, from my point of view, unpredictable times needs me to extend the model. The strange thing is that this is despite having a very simple model at the lowest levels of the system.