Don't know about a better solution, but there might be a better interface. My pet theory is that focusing more on the fact that a repo is a directed graph would

Don't know about a better solution, but there might be a better interface. My pet theory is that focusing more on the fact that a repo is a directed graph would help. Make the language more graph-like (less "commit" more "node", less "branch" more "path", less "repo" more "graph"). This kind of thinking would, I think, expose a bunch more primitives that should be surfaced more explicitly than they are (lots of things are "possible but not easy" in git), and make it easier to learn for anyone with a math background. And make web searches easier too. (Pretty sure I've said this before and it's been shot down before, so...)