The fact 3 of the top 5 questions of all time on Stack Overflow are for basic Git operations tells you something: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes.

IMO this all boils down to the Git CLI just being terrible e.g. “git add” to stage versus “git reset HEAD” to unstage. Pretty much everything is like that. And there are always edge cases so that a command works in this case but not in that one. Want to edit a commit message? "git amend". But only if the last one. Otherwise it's "git rebase -i" (even though your intent is not to do a rebase, go figure). Well, not if it's a merge actually, you'd need "git rebase -p" or something... Even if something is conceptually simple, Git CLI manages to make it complicated. And GUI tools don't help much as they just wrap the Git CLI.

Of course it does make sense if you know how Git is built internally, but that's irrelevant to getting the job done :)

Anyway, with GitUp, the idea is to have an interactive live map instead, where operations and UI actually make sense, while still being 100% compatible with Git under the hood.