[interroboink]

I can't speak for those other people, but as someone who likes MQ (even today!) I think one advantage is its conceptual simplicity. It's literally just patch files; you can edit them by hand if desired. For people comfortable with or used to that, I can see the allure vs. the more mysterious operations occurring in "rebase --interactive" and such. Even quilt, the MQ progenitor, is still used today (at least on Debian).

Wasn't there an option (4): using 'qsave' and 'qpush --merge' to merge two MQ series with 3-way merge support? I don't think I've every really used it, though.

But overall, yeah Mercurial was playing catch-up to Git on that front for a while. Surely didn't help adoption.