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thanks for the suggestion, i did recreate my problem so that i could present a properly reasoned argument rather than a ragey comment:

http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2013/11/why-i-hate-git.html

i'm pretty sure that i need to do this particular shooting myself in the foot to be able to do work unfortunately. i might be lacking knowledge, but it was far too difficult to acquire said knowledge. as someone who self taught himself programming in many languages,classically hard stuff like functional calculus, quantum field theory and general relativity - as much as that is a weak argument - i'm inclined to think there is insufficient information, or at least extremely poor documentation here.

Actually it does rewrite history by default AFAIK. This is how the merges work from the end user perspective.

I've never had trouble reverting a merge in any other context.

Agreed... rewriting history is a powerful tool that power users will want to use. Nothing more. That of course applies to all tools :)