And as anton_gogolev mentioned, ChangesetEvolution[1] will probably help augment HistEdit and Rebase for a number of operations. It will allow pushable history rewriting.
You answered that in your first paragraph: for many years, the first time people looked at Mercurial the answer for that class of problems was mq. The problem now is that it's still easy to find stale internal documentation, old blog posts, etc. which haven't been updated with the new recommendations. I thought that it might be worth having a small campaign to encourage people to update old wikis, contact blog authors, etc. when they find those recommendations and suggest a simple “this is no longer recommended – see …” update.
[1]: https://air.mozilla.org/changesets-evolution-with-mercurial/
Mercurial has some neat features, but this idea that it's always easy to use and git is always hard to use simply isn't true.