I've been thinking of a "sub-commit" concept, so a "beautiful, fake" commit that is atomic for most git operations, can be inspected more deeply, revealing bundled messy sub-commits that may be useful for understanding the history of that change. You get "every commit is a deliberately chosen, well-tested logical unit" as well as "present history as it actually happened." Maybe something like this can be done with certain branch/merge workflows, but I haven't seen it and don't understand git well enough to come up with it myself.