[dlitz]

That's interesting. My experience was the opposite: I've also been using git since 2008, and I find it to be the most intuitive, friction-free VCS that I've ever used.

I think the difference is that I didn't start with the official documentation. I watched a video of an introductory talk given by a local Linux kernel developer. The talk started with an explanation of the underlying data model, and then showed how each command manipulates the underlying data structure and how that's useful for version control.

The talk is a bit long and a bit dry, but to date, it's the best introduction to git that I've ever seen. I highly recommend it:

http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/