My experience has been that the alternative to many small commits, occasionally batched (because who really wants to look at "cleaned up Checkstyle's warnings"

My experience has been that the alternative to many small commits, occasionally batched (because who really wants to look at "cleaned up Checkstyle's warnings" endlessly?) is one big commit two or three times a day, which is significantly harder to digest. But in any case, as you allude to in your response, this is a social problem. I contend that the sort of people who work in a cave somewhere with a DVCS and then throw it all over the wall in a huge hunk would either do that anyway (see Linux kernel features before they make it into the mainland trunk for evidence; this was going on well before git, and if anything git has made it less of a problem) or wouldn't contribute at all.