[woofie11]

Very few git tutorials explain how git works. That's the underlying problem. Using git correctly requires knowing how it works. You solve that problem by having a reasonable userspace, like hg, or by having a proper course in college. Much like you learn databases, compilers, and operating systems, you should learn about hash trees and similar data structures.

I feel like the statement "FreeBSD successfully used SVN for a long time without any major issues" is a lot like saying "I wrote books on a typewriter without any major issues." Or "Why do I need pointers/references/data structures? I wrote my code in QuickBASIC without any major issues." Or "DOS doesn't have memory protection or multitasking, and I never had any major issues" or "I wrote my system without documentation or test infrastructure, and it's never been a problem."

At the time you switch to correctly using a DVCS, your productivity skyrockets.

If you're using SVN, you DO have a problem. You might not know you have a problem, but you do. If you're using git like svn, you also have a problem.

I agree with you that many programmers have a problem, though. Just not about the root cause or the solution.

Maybe the right solution is to write a Python implementation of git with a sane user-space. The original git was written in a couple weeks, and I don't think it'd be more than a few months of work to have feature parity.