[npsimons]

And finally, I'm genuinely curious... Why are some people so obsessed with perfect preservation of history? Is this some sense of fear/paranoia? In practice I've never found project history to be useful without modification, so what am I missing? What are people trying to preserve?

I think it's a conflation of having something like incremental backups versus having (as you so eloquently put it) a cleaned up log of development. Sure, you can use a VCS to record the minutiae of every little thing that changes so you have a "snapshot" of the code at any point in time. And git will do that if you want it.

But I'd also have to second your thoughts that git is VCS done right, that is, by maintainers. All code will have to be maintained sooner or later, and as someone who has had to maintain plenty of code, I can tell you I don't care at all about every little change that's made. Even when I'm bisecting a bug, I don't want to have to skip over every stupid bit that was twiddled, or see commits that are immediately reverted by the next commit. That's garbage. I want to see conceptual chunks, things that hang together because a human thought of them in the terms of "this is a feature" or "this fixes a bug". Should commits make the Minimum Necessary Change? Yes. Should a new feature or bug fix be split across several commits, possibly separated by other, unrelated commits, because that's the way some sleep deprived programmer thought of them? Do you like to read author's notes about their novels instead of the edited novels?