[jorams]

> magit-blame seems hard to read, I guess it's a limitation of emacs, or can it be configured to show the author name on the left of the line like CLI git blame?

There are different styles available. While blaming a file, press B to open the popup, then c to cycle through them.

> I tried to find the equivalent of "git add --patch", but did not find it in the info manual.

That's just the entire staging workflow. You see a list of changed files, which you can stage per file. Or you can expand a file to its changed chunks using TAB, then stage chunk by chunk. Or you can select some lines in the chunk and stage only those.