Thanks for the feedback. Quite frankly, I never found a comparable workflow in Mercurial (but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist). Commits still felt like a permanent thing that made me pause and think about whether something was "worthy" of a commit, thus I was unable to track my changes. This problem just doesn't exist in Git, though some care is needed when publishing (as w/any system).

I'm unaware of anything within base Mercurial that lets me do what I can do with git. Maybe the answer is to use the extensions, however that's a bit unsettling when some of them are being depreciated (eg. hg queues). Often times I found myself cloning and maintaining multiple directories for something that was better off as one thing. This led to reluctance to track changes, which is clearly evil. I guess I must have been doing something wrong, but I've heard similar feedback from others regarding Mercurial. I loved using hg and would have no problem using it (it was my first); I just prefer git now.