About that git "eating" commits - they're always recoverable from reflog: see `git log -g`. (where always == until you gc, or delete old clone, or ...)
Otherwise git's interface sucks and is inconsistent, but we're probably past the point of no return. There's always Easy Git and similar projects which aim to make it a bit better if someone wants to use them.
Up-voted for the salient observation that we're past the point of no return.
This occured to me as well recently, when there was a lot of web traffic about the git devs polling their audience about a minor behavioral change to git push[1]. What I realized then: git's interface is now more or less frozen, too much depends on it never changing significantly, that big 2.0 that'll fix everything will never come. At this point, we're stuck with all of git's quirks, until something new comes along that's significantly better in enough fundamental ways to displace it.
Frustrating in a way, but that's how it goes in the real world. Good thing the core is beautiful.
"At this point, we're stuck with all of git's quirks, until something new comes along that's significantly better in enough fundamental ways to displace it."
No, that won't be enough. You need something that's better than git in the same way git is better than SVN: A paradigm shift. Merely being nicer or easier at doing the same thing is rarely enough, you need to do something broadly useful the entrenched tool just cannot do.
Otherwise git's interface sucks and is inconsistent, but we're probably past the point of no return. There's always Easy Git and similar projects which aim to make it a bit better if someone wants to use them.