I don't think that's true. I've been using git's CLI since I started using git a few years ago, and exactly zero of my problems with git could've been solved by a different user interface (be it GUI or a "better" designed CLI). Pretty much all of my problems have been with my lacking understanding of the abstractions that git uses to make all of the powerful things it can do possible.

> I don't think that's true.

You are in the minority. It's such a ubiquitous experience, a running joke in the industry. Saying a tool is useful and powerful, is fine and good. That sentiment has nothing to do with usability.

Isn't that the same thing? If you need to be taught the underlying abstraction to be able to understand the UI you've got a text book example of leaky abstraction.

After I had to unfuck a repository for the n-th time, I trialed a switch to Mercurial, we switched shortly after. I can count on one hand how many times I've had to intervene in the last few years.

> It would also be nice to have a repo that isn't language-agnostic. It's too easy to track non-semantic changes, like white space.

In my opinion this is a problem with programming languages rather than version control. Namely we mix presentation and representation when using text as our source code. In the case of whitespace we have an infinite number of syntactic presentations which all correspond to the same semantic representation. Tooling has been created to try to deal with this such as code formatters which canonicalize the syntactic presentation for other tools. Git itself even has to deal with this because of platform differences, i.e. LF and CRLF.

> Git itself even has to deal with this because of platform differences, i.e. LF and CRLF.

I loathe this about git. It has caused my team members so many problems, like images marked as changed.

git should either be dumb about content or smart, not secretly in between.

I tend to think that it's fine, because I remember what it used to be like... what we have now is the "easy" UI!

And they do occasionally put some new stuff in that helps. Like the recent version which adds new commands to split out the two completely different uses for `git checkout` (making/switching branches and reverting files).

Between CVS and git, Canonical releases an excellent DVCS called Bazaar that I loved. I think we all ended up with git because of GitHub.

There is zero doubt in my mind that it's Github that "made" Git. Without it, it would be just another one of many DVCSes. Git's value isn't inherent, it's all down to network effects.