There sure is a lot of evangelizing for it if it's only intended for the 1% elite developer.

That's exactly the problem, i.e. those people who endlessly promoting git so that they can be seen as elite developer. Their favorite past time is to share their "get it" stories with the rest of the world.

Not unlike the "Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus" episode of South Park.

Git is a tool. You use it if it solves your problem. You can certainly use it the same way you'd use Subversion and it's not any harder - it'll just behave as a version control system that can buffer commits offline with two "levels" of commit - local and remote.

If you want to use the more complicated stuff, then there is no way to avoid learning the more complicated ideas.

There is a lot I don't understand about Git, but, as far as my usage patterns have gone, I'm very satisfied.

> You can certainly use it the same way you'd use Subversion and it's not any harder - it'll just behave as a version control system that can buffer commits offline with two "levels" of commit - local and remote.

That's hg. With git, you got the index / staging area, which is unique to git (no idea if bitkeeper has it). In other tools such as svn or hg, there is no need for flags such as "commit -a", "diff --cached", and "add -N".

> If you want to use the more complicated stuff, then there is no way to avoid learning the more complicated ideas.

And this is what we hate about git. Version control shouldn't be complicated for 99.9% of projects. I have used svn for 3 years and hg for 2, they get the job done just fine without cryptic commands and flags.