While patches and snapshots are duals of each other, patches are generally less easy to reason about and work with, in no small part because compilers and humans work on the snapshot, not the patch.

Having worked extensively with patches as the semantic unit via patch(1) and quilt and stgit, I'm very skeptical that a VCS based on patches is actually superior in most circumstances.

In this particular case, perhaps it would be helpful to view code reviews as a snapshot where the differences (possibly intra-review revision differences) are highlighted instead of as patches.