Agreed. Git rebase is patching the problem at the wrong end. The problem of elaborate history trees should be solved by grouping & summarizing or hiding sets of commits at the display end, not by rewriting history. Once you have a way of summarizing commits, you can start to do things like integrating version control with the undo of the text editor (with every keystroke being a commit). Another problem with current version control is that it does not understand the structure of code, which makes merges involve much more manual effort than necessary.