It’s good to point out that Linus appeared to nail the core data structures for a successful and performant DVCS in those 10 days. The git UI for the longest time was fairly obtuse yet that seems to have mattered less in this case than that the core foundations were solid as your comment points out.
Luckily, the Git UI has progressed massively and has graduated to merely obtuse.
It takes well planned effort to remain obstinately obtuse as thengit UI does. ;)
Joking aside, I only use a subset of git functionality which generally suffices. The part that keeps me happy is that the tools for detecting files renames, and diff’ing tools continue to improve and become very useable (despite the diff options being quite archane at times). There was an article a while back discussing how git’s straightforward approach of storing the original data blocks allowed the continued improvement of the diff and rename tracking tools in contrast to others like mercurial or bazaar which tried more sophisticated delta (?) techniques upfront. Wish I could find that article again, but it would support the parent’s premise that choosing the right models and framework make a 10x programmer.
The fact that Bitkeeper precipitated git does not really diminish the accomplishment in my eyes. Remember, Bitkeeper was closed source, and the licensing crisis was precipitated by reverse engineering of Bitkeeper in the broader kernel developer community. Linus specifically set out to build a replacement from first principles and he built an incredible foundation in a very short amount of time. If it was a straight clone that would be one thing, but in reality git is its own thing, and fairly par for the course in terms of a top engineer leveraging past experience to build something better.