> Edit: the model I adapted to from my hg workflows is effectively commit --amend. Mercurial has an interesting way of doing history tracking such that if I really need to, I can actually follow the history of the "oops, I need to change these commit because I missed a compiler failure" or "I forgot to save this file before committing," which is a feature that git doesn't have. If you promoted amending the last commit, you wouldn't need a staging area to build up a commit, the last commit does it for you already.

I'm confused about what you think --amend is lacking. If you want a full history including amendments, why not make real commits? In case you need it git can track the original edit-showing history of something too, it's just awkward. Do you think more people would use it if it was easy?

Also if you really want to uncommit and restage it's a simple command to write down. (reset --soft HEAD^)