If you could expand it into a longer answer, I would appreciate that - perhaps there are some pieces of good design (git add -p?) in Git, but overall it's too messy for many.
Other commands like stash, checkout and branch are equally simple. It’s just a very simple user experience.
I think where people express confusion over git is that they don’t expect to be interact with revision history, rather just inflicting changes onto a head-only svn style repo.
People are mistakenly encouraged to bring that mentality to the table when it’s not useful. You need bring a mentality that you’re mutating and sculpting branches.
It’s like a beginner saying “snowboards are complicated” because they come in expecting it to be like a sled. You hear the same complaints about other systems like darcs and mercurial too, for the same reasons, even though each of those offers respectively super easy to use cli experiences as does git.
Ok, so they are the simple because you say so? Stash in all but the simplest cases is a sure-fire way to shoot yourself in the foot. Checkout is a weird guy, he does too many different things, and what's up with the double dashes? Super-weird! Also beware that any of your branch names happen to match any of the file names in the repo :O.
> I think where people express confusion over git is that they don’t expect to be interact with revision history
This is one of the things that confuses beginners about git, but it's not a confusion about git cli. You are conflating the criticism of git cli with criticism of git. Git is good, git cli is (notoriously) bad. However, eventually you'll (hopefully) learn the proper incantations and then using git cli will seem simple to you.
> “You are conflating the criticism of git cli with criticism of git.”
Not at all. I’m saying most of the time when people say they are confused by git cli, that it behaves counter to their expectations, they are not actually expressing any design limitation of the cli commands themselves, but instead blaming cli commands for the conceptual confusion they have about git’s model in general.
Once you grok rebasing branches, git add, push, pull, bisect, rebase, log, commit --amend are all I have needed to work with Git and the experience has been far better than working with any other version control like SVN or Mercurial.