Git is too hard

For example, the concepts of "ours" and "theirs" when looking at changes depends on the current operation mode (rebase vs merge).

Merging is unsafe-by-default, because it auto-merges even if both branches have modifications to the same file, and there is no guarantee that the resulting file is correct.

There are numerous ways to collaborate on a git repo, with vastly different performance/usability implications, none of which is obvious when you start up (merging remote into local, rebasing local onto remote, squashing local commits; patches vs pushes).

Not to mention that, for teams that work with a centralized remote repo, the whole concept of local tracking branches adds mental overhead for nothing, and extra work every time you want to push a change to a remote branch. You have to first pull, even if your changes and the remote ones don't touch the same files. Which of course means that, if you had a dirty worktree, you actually need to run 3 commands - one to stash your changes, one to pull, the actual push, and now an unstash.

My explanation would be:

Git won because it was used for Linux and because it was fastest where it mattered.

For example on knowing branches having local and remote versions, "because why would they"..they would because if they want to use the tool effectively then they need to know how it works. This is the same reason I learned how to use git prune. Would I ever use it on production code without a backup? No.

A GUI is not the solution, because a GUI can never equal the expressiveness and capability of skill combined with a parcity of input provided by the command line. If it did then the complexity of using the GUI would be just as hard, or harder, than the command line interface. However, there are many who do not need more than basic Git. Those can be served by a simple GUI, or by pre-provisioned Git aliases with documentation of what those aliases do.

I still dislike a GUI because I have had a number of people come to me to fix things on a team that used SourceTree and accidentally did something horrible, either because their finger slipped or because they didn't realize what they were doing and the GUI made it too easy to do it.

All powerful tools should have a simple version and a complex version. Git is extremely powerful, but has no simple version for everything.

What helped training new people was telling them to think of git like a complex copy operation across computer boundaries, and explaining the commands in terms of that. Once they've gotten comfortable with the basics then you can explain how it differs from copy (and it does, greatly).

No connection to the server no committing - no confusion about local vs remote. Branching only on the server, merging totally useless - no branches, no merging, no conflicts. Want to have your local development versioned - zipfile + date time.

I would never go back to that, but from people complains some might want to.

You have to understand a lot of things before you can somewhat comfortably use git, much more than something like P4.