Git appears to be a tool to manage merges using deltas. Git is actually a tool that simply stores everything in the current commit, and makes a nice graph showing Connections between those commits which theoretically represent deltas.

All trouble arises when this abstraction breaks. It seems to me that the purpose of git merge is to simply allow you to work around broken abstractions. You can make the graph appear how you want, without having to jump through a bazillion unnecessary hoops to make a nice set of deltas.

Or... I'm wrong and about to find out after hitting "add comment"