I can see your point but the fundamental problem is that unless you have a simple linear history a DVCS can't possibly know how to merge and apply patches witho

I can see your point but the fundamental problem is that unless you have a simple linear history a DVCS can't possibly know how to merge and apply patches without some heuristics. At best the DVCS can be a tool to assist you. There is of course a lot of simple tasks which DVCS can and do apply near perfectly but I suppose managing a complex project you're at some point going to have to have a basic understanding of how the system works. I've used IBM's RTC which is an excellent GUI VCS tool that I believe internally works similar to git/hg but it attempts to hide how its internals works so on a large merge 500+ changesets and then remerging more commits it refused to push despite saying no incoming changesets. We ended up fixing it by pulling to a different repository based of the branch we were trying to merge from based of advice from support. But I'd prefer a deterministic cli interface over a gui interface anyday.