[pmeunier]

> why would you (or the authors of Pijul) care about this extremely rare case?

I'm the main author, and my answer is: because it allowed to to model with great mathematical rigor what conflicts are, how to represent them and how to treat them in the most intuitive and accessible way. The rest is indeed less essential, but still nice to have (I like doing my backups on an external hard drive using Pijul to copy my software projects).