Yeah, this barely scratches the surface though.

Take branching, which is something you're supposed to be doing all the time. So abstractly, I want to be able to get a list of my current branches, create a new branch, check out an existing branch, delete an existing branch, and maybe rename a branch. I would expect the commands for these operations to be something like:

    git branch list
    git branch create [name]
    git branch delete [name]
    git branch rename [old-name] [new-name]

We can argue over whether checking out a branch should be "git branch checkout [name]" or just "git checkout [name]", but in either case, if I have unsaved changes in my working directory, I would expect to at least get a warning about this before that work got clobbered.

None of these things are actually the case. Git checkout will clobber unsaved changes in my working directory. "Git branch list" is just "git branch". "git branch create" is "git branch [name]". So creating a branch is the SAME COMMAND as the one you use to produce a list of current branches, just with an argument. Madness. And this is the rule, not the exception. Minor variations on a theme can result in radically different commands with various mysterious arguments. There is no rhyme or reason or regularity. The only way to know is to look it up.