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.
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.