Ok few things I'd like to address.

    "...developers asking for more features, control, consideration ect; and it github largely seemed to be ignoring these concerns."

Users will always ask for more features, or a specific functionality that addresses their single pain point. Rushing to add these things causes technical debt and dilutes your product. Beautiful products should be simple. The right approach is to listen to users and figure out the root cause of their pains, and then perhaps decide if the need is big enough address it.

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." — Steve Jobs

    "So yes, even though they both just copied open source software created by linus torvalds..."

Ok have to stop you here. The git protocol and cli indeed was written by Linus, but git never tackled how to bring it into a beautiful web interface. git never brought social interaction (issues, pull requests) into coding. GitHub created a lot of innovation in their product and technically.