heh, I'm highly sympathetic of what you say :) . I also got to use git after being told how awesome it was, by people who themselves were told how awesome it was, and so on and so forth. And for many years, I was a believer, too, and probably heightened the bar of what I found acceptable as a result.
That's not to downplay git qualities, but as a social experiment in soft peer-pressure and group-thinking, I think it has value (though that's beyond my field of expertise).
I came to mercurial when, after shooting myself in the foot with git for the N-th time and going on a rant about it, someone on IRC told me to give mercurial a shot and move on with my life. I confess that TortoiseHG helped me translate my git habits into the equivalent hg commands, and the kind of history exploration that I was doing then set me up to speed with the revset way.
Then, what I found formidable was that all the knowledge about git intricacies that I had accrued and internalized with pride over the years became absolute no-brainers and irrelevant in the hg world: I remember a famous stackoverflow thread in 10 steps for merging two unrelated repos (including arcane git commands, shelling-out to sed, and non-transactional storage-level ops that would warrant a backup, as was the norm back then). How do you get history from a repo in hg? `hg pull`. How would you go about getting history from a repo (unrelated) in hg? `hg pull` as well. And thinking about it, would have git been nicely designed, it wouldn't have had to care about the difference and even less so had to expose it to the user.
Mercurial, although not perfect, really opened my eyes on what good UX design should look like.