I can't say I _read_ commit messages all the time. I do however, _look_ for commit messages all the time.

And am frequently disappointed.

The comments I put in commits are things you'd be horrified to see littering your codebase (though I did it that way once upon a time too). They are the "whys" behind a change. Sometimes they have relatively little to do with individual lines of code, and don't need to be maintained like comment blocks should be. The temporal binding is absolutely intended.