It wasn't entirely obvious what you were responding to in my post exactly. That article is satire, but if you don't even want to accept that maybe the git commands are badly named (and besides your one bad example, there are plenty of real examples in the satire) I don't see much point in having a discussion.

It being "just a wrapper around git" is an excellent argument that the user interface and usability are problematic. Nobody is arguing with the mathematical model underlying git. Gitless manages to expose a lot less state by default. That's a usability win. It's still there when you need it. There is no expressiveness lost. I find the examples they give on their website very persuasive:

http://gitless.com/#vs

If you want the detailed analysis of weaknesses of git that led to the design of gitless, it's here:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/sperezde/onward13.pdf

I don't necessarily agree with everything in there but I think it's an excellent analysis overall and worth reading as a case study anyways.

Thank you so much for posting that pdf, that really should be posted somewhere on that site because without the context just throwing out "it's git without a staging area" seems like a pretty poor argument. After reading the whitepaper I would still say that I'm not sure there's much value in the project, that being said they did manage to simplify the "mental model"... although honestly not by much. I'm not sure the cost is worth the benefit here.

No problem, BTW, in my mind it's getting rid of the (need to) stash and improved management of untracked files that are the major simplifications, not staging.

In my workflow I also see no cost, but I am happy to accept that that's because we don't have very sophisticated needs.