Can I repro giving the Github client to newbies and getting desperate pleas for help soon afterwards? Yes, it's consistent :-)

No, I have not tried to reproduce the incidents which screwed up my repository. After a few harrowing experiences I pretty much gave up using the Github for Mac client for anything except basic commits. And even that screws up - I frequently have to commit files twice; it's like the client only stages some of the files, even though they're all checked. If my commits are large I usually go to the command line to avoid the double commit msgs. I'm about to give up entirely.