Earlier quoted context omitted.
> way better tools I work with a group of people who all know enough git that we're productive, and a few of us know enough git to solve complicated problem. I've not seriously considered fossil or mercurial -- what are the top three tangible benefits I'd get from them getting our team to switch?
I have never used Fossil, but I used to be a strong proponent of Mercurial. My advice is don't - Mercurial lost, git has won, and fighting against the current is just going to make your life harder. The main advantage Mercurial has over git is a command line syntax that makes consistent sense. The operations you want to do are easy and as you try and do more complicated things, the new commands will be unsurprising a…
But stuff like: "hg log" gives you _every commit in the repo_?? When is that ever useful? How do I get only the commits that lead to the current state of the repo? Mercurial doesn't have branches; instead you're supposed to _copy the whole directory_[1] at the filesystem level?? Of course this is ridiculous, so they invented "bookmarks" which are actually Git branches. The extensions thing you mention is also a ridiculous chore. Just have sane defaults. I also found hg's output very dense and hard to understand and read, poorly suited for human consumption.
I dunno. I'm sure Mercurial is fine, many people use it every day, and likely my strong Git bias was affecting my ability to learn Mercurial. But I found it far easier to just clone into Git, use Git to do source control, and then export back to Mercurial when I'm ready to share my work.