Thanks! I meant to mention that --preserve-merges is not really for use with interactive rebase, and does not work at all with pull --rebase, but I was in a bit of a hurry.

I did not know about rebase-merges!

> The --rebase-merges mode is similar in spirit to --preserve-merges, but in contrast to that option works well in interactive rebases: commits can be reordered, inserted and dropped at will.