I don't get this "it makes things easier for a select few, so everyone else just has to suffer an over complicated system" thing. We should make the few suffer instead of the masses; optimize to lower global suffering. It should be possible to build a system that exposes different interfaces to different users, shouldn't it?
Modular commits with good messages are analogous to well-written code with good documentation - both are not terribly important (though not harmful either!) for individual contributors but absolutely critical for teams and especially those working at the aggregate team level, like the release managers and team leads your parent mentioned.
Well it is. You can make branching as complex or as simple as you want. Where I work the developers are only ever exposed to the feature branch they are working on, which is even created automagically for each Jira ticket from the correct release/integration/dev branch. So for a developer it really couldn't be any simpler.
This guy in the crowd finds it very convenient to be able to commit locally so that you can easily get back to an earlier state of the thing when you fuck up or wants to explore another way to do it.
Would be interesting to compare that to repositories created in the last 2 years or something. It might have quite a different distribution as some old projects probably have kept the vcs they started out with.
