I think one problem is that submodules are kind of over-kill in situations where what you really want is to have separate repos for various reasons but one way

I think one problem is that submodules are kind of over-kill in situations where what you really want is to have separate repos for various reasons but one way of pulling them all in at once. You could make a script with the origins etc but then you put than in a repo and then ... I use them in my personal projects and have a sprawling mass of crazy. It "works" but it's a pain and I have scripts to recursively crawl through and basically do 'git pull' everywhere or 'git push'. So if you end up using submodules when you don't really care about versioning the sub-repos, I think you end up feeling a bit of an idiot like me. But it's a pain to reverse.