[wisty]

The git community seemed a little inaccessible at the time (though that might have just been because they were very smart and very busy). Documentation was couched in graph theory, and Windows support wasn't a priority.

The attitude seemed to be "git is a powerful command line tool for manipulating a graph-theory-based file system, which uses cryptographic hashes to identify nodes. Use it with care, as you don't want to do a hard reset on the index when you really wanted a semi-soft reset -- that could be bad".

Mercurial sold itself as a distributed version control system.

Github has done a lot to bring git into the mainstream (I'm switching on account of them), but it's taken a long time for git to become newbie friendly.