My point is that Git has accumulated too much cruft and has introduced one too many concepts to be usable.
Your point is totally invalid, since git is self-evidently successful, and regarded by many people as usable.
The "cruft" you've pointed to consists of usable, useful features. So it would be useful to talk more about areas in which git could improve—even if that involves looking at features from Mercurial—rather than engaging in vague and abstract descriptions of "cruft".
As much as you want IT world to be a meritocracy, it is not. Very rarely software gets popular based exclusively on its merits.
With Git, it gained popularity not because it was terribly usable [1] or generally good (it was not even going to be an SCM [2]), but because it was imposed by Linus onto a pretty large number of developers - kernel hackers, not less - and then it spread from there.
I'm also aware that nothing you said actually dealt with the fact that git is not unusable. In fact, it's objectively pretty good—if it weren't, we'd all still be using SVN.
What you seem to be saying is that you prefer the UX of Mercurial. Cool, that's fine - but I'd be keen for people to invest their time in improving the experience of using git, rather than bellyaching about perceived differences which aren't really all that big.
(As an aside, I don't really agree that there's a problem with git's usability. It's a complex tool, if you want it to be. But for day-to-day distributed SCM, you'll rarely have to care about most of that.)
There are no objective criteria to measure usability, so Git cannot possibly be "objectively pretty good", sorry.
Again, popularity has nothing to do with merit. It's a pure happenstance that Git was chosen over Mercurial for kernel development, and it all went from there.
The UX of Git cannot possibly be improved in the foreseeable future as it will be a _massive_ pile of breaking changes with people moaning all over the internet.
Your point is totally invalid, since git is self-evidently successful, and regarded by many people as usable.
The "cruft" you've pointed to consists of usable, useful features. So it would be useful to talk more about areas in which git could improve—even if that involves looking at features from Mercurial—rather than engaging in vague and abstract descriptions of "cruft".