Thanks for the quick follow-up!
This might be a difference in expectations, where we are talking about two styles of merge requests. I believe they can be both supported well by gitlab (in fact, I consider gitlab to be the best review tool out there because it has support for both styles).
## Gerrit style MR
Mostly a merge request with a single commit. All relevant information is placed in MR title/description. If there are more than one commits, they are usually added to review the first commit based on review feedback or problems detected by CI. The commits are often squashed before merge to master, so the individual commit messages are secondary to the MR title/description.
## Patch series style MR
A merge requests with multiple commits, each containing a single logical change. The MR title/description only contains high level information/summary - more detailed description is found in the commits.
If serious problems are found either by CI or reviewer, the developer often amends the commits rather than push new commits on top. The reason why is that each commit should be as complete as possible, which helps reviewing, git bisect and keeping a good git log history.
This style requires more upfront work by the developer, but the advantage is that reviewing becomes easier. Instead of reviewing a large diff with many different changes, the reviewer can look at a single commit at a time. Some types of changes such as refactor, reformat can quickly be verified and reviewed because they are not making any semantics changes. A commit containing a bug fix is much quicker to review if there are no refactoring, reformating or other semantic changes in the same diff.
Good commits should also have good commit messages, which describes what, why and why like /this/. Just as important, this information should be easily available when reviewing the merge request. It should be easy to iterate through all the commits in a merge request, reviewing both the commit message and the commit diff for each commit.
With the latest changes of gitlab, I feel it's being optimized for Gerrit style merge requests, in which case your comment make sense that you're not sure about showing the full commit message. However, for me this is a major step back since we do patch series style merge requests where each commit is often reviewed individually.