There is nothing about gitless that provides a decent experience (compared to git) and certainly nothing about gitless that has anything to do with operating at "scale".
The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them.
I'm not saying the git experience can't get better, but the way forward is to modify the existing tools and contribute to the project, not make git wrapper number 84 that does nothing special.
That's a rather condescending thing to say and not accurate or supportive of the view of git you seem to hold.
> The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them.
Until someone on the team _does_ use them and then things can become messed up in ways it takes a git expert to figure out how to fix. I've used git for several years and had never even come across filter-branch, I'd have to chase down the git docs to see what it even does. I never had to filter anything with CVS, Continuus, Perforce, SourceSafe or Subversion.
Part of the benefit of the tool is that you can blow everything away and restart. It's distributed, which means you CAN fuck up your local copy and there are no consequences. It's been years since I've had a repository be in an "unrecoverable" state and part of that is actually taking the time to understand what I'm doing as opposed to just crossing my fingers and hoping shit works.
The fact that other version control systems don't even have some of the power features git has is a big reason git is so popular.
Again, if you don't understand the more complicated commands, don't use them (although you should- they are incredibly powerful and worth learning about). If your team is forcing some bizarre workflow on newer developers that involves using filter-branch and cherry-pick all over the place without good reason, that's an organizational issue, not one with git.
Yes, I've worked with RCS, CVS, SVN, SourceSafe, Perforce and some others, though know them less well.
Git is bar none the best of all (of which I've had experience) the VCS' out there. I would pick it over anything else. The issues I'm pointing out are not because I don't use it, don't understand it, or don't appreciate it. I just believe that it's too complex.
If git was literally just the set of commands you listed, that would be great. As a single user experience it's hardly ever an issue. But that doesn't mean that it can't be better! And that's why I like this gitless project (and some of the other similar ones out there), it's trying to create a decent experience that will scale.
Also, your example is about creating a new git repo, I find this to be much more rare than getting involved in an already built and multi-member team, which may have all sorts of rules about proper merges or rebases, and such.