Except it seems the world keeps insisting that I use the hammer to bash on the screws.
I have never encountered that. Binary files are generally kept in something like SharePoint, where it is SharePoint which is then hated by everyone.
It's interesting that regardless of the tool, everyone seems to hate it. Perhaps if all tools are wrong, you are trying to force a bad usecase?
The world has non-text files that require version control support. Version control systems are mostly bad-to-terrible for anything other than source code. Implying that the use case is wrong is borderline offensive.
It’d be nice if there were some artist/designer friendly version control systems. I can teach someone who has never even heard of version control how to use Perforce in 10 minutes. It’s darn near idiot proof and near impossible to shoot your foot off. Git is not easy to use. This is evidenced by the tens of thousands of blogs explaining how easy and simple to use it is. If that were the case there wouldn’t be need for all those posts!
Someday.
Which is fine, but saying that git is rubbish because it doesn't handle binary files as you want it to is a bad usecase.
How version control would handle diffs between PDFs is not the same as photos, which is not the same as video. They have to be content aware for these sorts of things.
If you just want images then gitlab does a good enough job.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-test/-/commit/2f63565e7...
How would we represent video diffs? I don't deal with video so I'm not an expert, but there appears to be people complaining without suggesting solutions.
A theoretical Git2 could provide Perforce-tier support for large binary files. But, imho, this would likely require dropping the D in DVCS. I would gladly trade distributed for large binary file support. Without even a moment’s hesitation. Other people wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t call their use case “bad”.
Git is rubbish for my needs. It’s rubbish for a lot of needs. It’s ok at some things. Mercurial is much better at those things though.
I would also love some kind of good (even decent would be enough) VCS for binary/non-text files. I get a stress rash just watching our designers work with "final_final_2023_1_backup_new.psd".
I think Git is relatively simple in relation to all the complicated things you can do with it. If you don't need/use those complicated things, it of course feels like way too much work for too little pay off.
That's not really a problem with the tool, though. That's a social problem.