You wrote: People have asserted your claim many times but can't ever give specific things to fix about the "abstraction."

That seems like you made an assertion as well. I think there are counter-examples.

For example, the point of gitless is (quoting http://gitless.com/ ):

> Many people complain that Git is hard to use. We think the problem lies deeper than the user interface, in the concepts underlying Git. Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts

Some commentary is at https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/10/24/whats-wrong-with-git-a-c... .

Many HN discussions as well, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927485 .