The author sums up his gripe here: The user isn't supposed to read the docs to accomplish something simple. Simple things should be intuitive. Hard things

The author sums up his gripe here: The user isn't supposed to read the docs to accomplish something simple. Simple things should be intuitive. Hard things should be discoverably-solvable. No, just imagine this for a second: you are manipulating a quite complex graph by issuing calls from a bunch of rather obscure set of functions, not knowing what will happen exactly, simply hoping, each time, that everything will be alright. If this doesn't make you feel wretched, I don't know what can. It's just a fucking graph. And it just needs the right fucking tool to let you change it, safely, with no tricky bullshit or second-guessing. It's not asking for much. It's the only way it should be. So, when you are doing something in a version control system, you ought to be constantly seeing what the state is.