Delta patches become effortless
If everyone uses it wrong, it was designed wrong. See Q-tips.
It's of almost zero utility, but it does (for me) heighten the beauty and elegance of the concepts behind git (and even, the actual implementation).
... and btw, haven't thought about git in awhile, and am reviewing its concepts. It does really have some nice features - always used to think the staging area was an unused feature (and at least for me, it kind of is), but local branches are super useful, and it seems like all that focus on git being a distributed vcs allows (and requires) a dev to work more locally first in very flexible ways. This is really, really nice. Still not sure all the complexity is worth it...
Know this has been said countless times, but some abstraction layer on top of git (that is actually apart of git itself so that it becomes standard) would have been really nice. Understandably, since git started its life in use by sharp linux-devs, usability probably wasn't at the forefront, but yeah, how many countless hours worldwide would have been saved if git was easier to use? (the dreaded botched friday-night commit and update)
And, yeah, don't know if i'd call it simple in the way you're using the word. It's simple in that the tool is very "RISC" in nature instead of CISC, doing smaller simple operations instead of larger more complex ones (except for a few exceptions like pull). But for procedures like pushing your code, it's complex. You have to do a lot of things yourself that other VCS take care of. As you probably are aware of, you need to make sure you do things in the correct order, because the tool won't help you if you make a mistake. Don't think something like source control should be this way (especially when other VCS's don't require this amount of thought).
Just my two cents.
You are right that it gives you more options and more ways to footgun yourself but that mostly came after the fact. It does need a simplicity wrapper or some better defaults.