But you can use your awesome vim skill to feed text into a OpenOffice document, and while the OOo internals are probably 100x more complicated than vim, the user interface for "text on my screen" stays the same, and transition is smooth, even though the internals underneath is vastly different. If git requires 'everyone' to know the internals before they can use it, as opposed to rcs,cvs,svn,perforce users who can more easily flip around between those for most basic usages, then its on git for having a complicated shell around a complicated set of internals.

It would have been nice if there was a simpler shell around the complex machinery for those (us?) who don't want to do crazy stuff, who don't need to be able to do crazy stuff and who could settle for only the simple 90% of the tooling like we do with the alternatives, but are forced to use git for external reasons.

Plain text is internally ropes-something, indented with meters of vimscript, colored with a syntax model that is okay to change, hard to create from scratch, etc. it’s all hidden from a regular user who uses a subset of all features.

But if you ignore the non-ms movement, shortcuts and advanced transforms, it is still a text editor that everyone may use. You can’t put your text (text, not a current mode!) into a state that looks okay but requires a vim guru to continue or start over because something is broken in the model. That’s different from git issues where working copy looks okay, but the branch and merge are broken in subtle ways.

>Plain text is just a lot simpler than a VCS repository.

Than a Git repository, not a VCS one. Not saying that VCS = plain text, but much simpler models exist for merging teh codes.