[DigitalJack]

I love the staging area, and I miss it everytime I have to us SVN at work.

I actually use the GIT-SVN bridge to work with git locally, pushing my changes up to SVN when I've resolved a topic. I do this in part because of the staging area. I have accidentally included changes in SVN commits so many times that I try to avoid SVN altogether.

I agree though, so many of the commands are just plain painful, the reset command(s) is a perfect example.

You have it right that it was designed as a data model. Linus has said a few times that it wasn't originally intended to be the Source Control Management tool itself, but more like a kit for building an SCM. Sadly, it took off so quickly simply because Linus built it and was adopted as the end user solution.

[stormbrew]

I have really mixed feelings about the index, personally. It is nice to be able to incrementally build up a change, but I do think that it's a thing that complicates learning for new users.

I'm curious, as someone who actually loves it, what if there were just better tools for incrementally altering the last commit instead? I'm not sure that a more robust git commit --amend couldn't achieve the same goals as the index with less conceptual overhead.