On the other hand, I'm tired of short commit messages that are almost completely devoid of anything useful because the author wanted to adhere to an arbitrary r

On the other hand, I'm tired of short commit messages that are almost completely devoid of anything useful because the author wanted to adhere to an arbitrary restriction. It feels like the mentality that all comments are evil and can be fixed by better method names. The short message first, longer message after is a pretty good middle ground. But if that first sentence is useless, I'd rather just have a single commit message that accurately describes the commit.