[stefco_]

Though git's interface is highly flawed, I do think a good VCS needs to expose more of its storage model to the user (or at least a model isomorphic to it) than most apps.

In vi and Word, you're not worried about state changes outside of saving the current state and, possibly, undoing some number of steps. In a VCS, you might need to check out, merge, or compare arbitrary states from the history, and doing this inherently requires a deeper understanding of how the history is stored. A good VCS should expose these internals in a clear way. In my experience, working with even 1 teammate immediately requires you to have some mental model of how your VCS deals with merging different histories.

That said, it's up to the VCS's interface to make these things clear. Git's mental model is simple enough, and the porcelain can do some of this stuff very well, but CLI is arcane; I end up storing extremely common functions as shortcuts because I'd never remember them or want to type them even though I use them dozens of times a day.