[arw0n]

Networking effects are significantly strengthened by necessary user buy in. VC is hard, and every tool demands its users to spend a non-significant amount of time learning it. I would guess the time to move from black magic to understanding most of git is ~100h for most people.

The thing is, to understand which one is actually better, you would have to give the same amount of investment in the second tool, which is not something most people are willing to do if the first tool is "good enough". That's how Python became the default programming language; people don't miss features they do not understand.

[Izkata]

A little over a decade ago, with only svn experience, I tried both mercurial and git. There was something about how mercurial handled branches that I found extremely confusing (don't remember what), while git clicked immediately - even without reading the manual.

So at least for me, git was clearly better.

[ptx]

Mercurial later added bookmarks which work like Git branches. These make more sense to me as well.

[qsera]

Did bookmarks moved as you made commits, like a branch pointer in git does?

[ptx]

Yup: https://mercurial-scm.org/help/commands/bookmarks