Thanks for the well reasoned response! Your points are all reasonable, and I understand the pragmatism in wanting only fully-green commits to be on origin. I just think merge commits for logical chunks of work are more important. I read history to understand developer intention and process more than I bisect history to find problems. Those conflicted commits aren't broken, they represent the best effort at the time the changes were made and merely need to be merged together with the world as it is now.