Git makes it way harder than necessary to do all these things and has a steep learning curve (generally a euphemism for bad design). I'm proposing that you can

Git makes it way harder than necessary to do all these things and has a steep learning curve (generally a euphemism for bad design). I'm proposing that you can get all the benefits you talk about but in a far more usable manner. I like a clean master branch with atomic sensible commit messages as much as the next man. Git just makes it a real chore to get there. You seemed confused about the history and branch navigation, so maybe I can explain that one better. What I want is to visually view the history of a file, and trace, for instance, a function as it moves through my project, into different files, etc. I also want to easily find code that I deleted in the past to use as a reference for implementing a new version of the code, rather than keeping it in some "obsolete" folder in source control. I have seen people who do that. There are ways to do these things now involving searching git logs and viewing diffs or checking out old branches, but the interface is very poor. Even the interface on Time Machine is better than git, and that thing isn't build to source code. But perhaps you are correct. Maybe most people use git primarily as a backup service for code. If so I guess git should make that a way better process. I will point out that github actually offers a way better interface to git than git does. It just still has a long way it can go.