I was like 4 years old when git was released, so I'm unaware of any of this. Sorry.
Its not damning to call something broken, plenty of software has bugs that make it unusable and are broken to many people. In fact, many tools have been made in anger at other tools not doing what you want them to do. This is just the software inception cycle. You should be allowed to be angry at the brokenness of software... its what allows improvement.