Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is opportunity for a powerful tool to handle the very common bad practice of including giant binary blobs which don't belong in version control Why do you say it's bad practice? Game assets come to mind, these aren't derived artifacts and you can't build the game without them.
Usually, you can build the game without them, up to the final packaging stage. Almost any game that is built on an engine can have all of the asset files swapped out without having to recompile anything, and as long as the file format and structure for assets is relatively stable there doesn't have to be a tight coupling between engine versions and asset versions except when doing QA and benchmarking. This is one of…
Historically I've dealt with the problem by keeping code and assets in separate repositories (using different version control systems). While it's worthwhile to do so in order to use git for code it really is a pain.