What am I missing building projects with VS or xbuild?
Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it. Those versions are known to work with the codebase and there's no chance of new bugs or other incompatible behavior being introduced from updates to the dependencies.
AFAIK, even NuGet doesn't allow you to just check in the dependency spec, rather than the contents of all of your dependencies.
> Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it.
I agree. But that doesn't mean that they belong in Git, nor that they should even be copied to every single project.
I have a project where I only checked in the solution's repositories.config (packages/repositories.config) and the project's packages.config (ProjectName/packages.config), and it seems to work fine.