It is true that Git can be used in a fairly simple way, although it is still significantly more complex than RCS. RCS has the whopping total of nine commands,

It is true that Git can be used in a fairly simple way, although it is still significantly more complex than RCS. RCS has the whopping total of nine commands, admittedly with various options and subcommands. $git --help yields a list of twenty-one commonly used commands out of the 148. However, in practice, Git is being used in rather complex ways that are error prone and often lead to using other commands than the twenty-one "commonly used" Git commands such as git reflog, cherry-pick and others not in the "commonly used" list. I have seen people combine a large number of changes into a single commit using Git's interactive rebase. The actual history remains in a local "private" branch on someone's computer. If it later turns out there was a bug introduced in this rebased mega-commit, it may be impossible to find the actual history and localize the actual change that caused the problem. Even with access to the local repository, the actual changes may be found only in a feature or fix side branch with a cryptic name, one of hundreds generated using the lightweight branching in Git. There is no simple linear history of the changes with rebasing. git reflog, in principle, gives a complete history but it is a confusing log of everything done and the information stored in it has an expiration time, which defaults to 90 days. --expire=<time> Entries older than this time are pruned. Without the option it is taken from configuration gc.reflogExpire, which in turn defaults to 90 days. --expire=all prunes entries regardless of their age; --expire=never turns off pruning of reachable entries (but see --expire-unreachable). The obvious question from a usability perspective is: if twenty-one commands are all you really need, why confuse users with 148? Actually, I got an astonishing 165 git commands using $ git help -a with Git version 1.7.9 on Cygwin versus nine (9) RCS commands. Bit by Git