Do you have a source for this widespread acceptance? I mean I get that version control in general can be hard for new developers to wrap their heads around but I never really had trouble picking up git personally, and the interns at my workplace haven't had any significant trouble either besides needing some coaching in how rebase works.
This comment (from a Hg developer on Lobste.rs [1]) is a good start:
> Furthermore, the proliferation of git wrappers says something. Mercurial has a lot of users too (Facebook), and guess what, they don’t write wrappers for it. They do write aliases and extensions, using hg’s established customisation mechanisms, but they don’t feel like the entire UI is so terrible that it has to be completely replaced by a different UI
Then let's consider this snippet, from the people that literally wrote the book on Git, in the Chapter "Git Internals" [2]:
> You may have skipped to this chapter from a previous chapter, or you may have gotten here after reading the rest of the book — in either case, this is where you’ll go over the inner workings and implementation of Git. I found that learning this information was fundamentally important to understanding how useful and powerful Git is, but others have argued to me that it can be confusing and unnecessarily complex for beginners.
If you don't know the internals, you don't really know git. I use git for client work on at least a weekly basis - not necessarily daily. I know enough to use it, and enough to know when I need to check the manual or search for something. I don't know the internals, and it's wrong that we 'need' need to.
Careful with equating "Facebook is a wildly market-successful product" with "Every engineering practice at Facebook is industry-applicable and should be emulated".
I didn't, the Hg dev simply used Facebook as a very large, well known software shop that uses Mercurial. We could swap out "Facebook" for "Mozilla" or "Nginx Inc." or a number of open source (either community or corporate backed) projects.
We could do the same thing with Git though, so clearly source control scheme is not strongly correlated with actual success of the project -- which makes sense.
The point was that there are a lot of git "wrappers" created to solve the problem of Git's usability. The same doesn't happen with Mercurial, and it isn't just because of a lack of use, as demonstrated by X, Y, Z prominent/large software companies/projects using it.
If you haven't had those issues, you're one of the lucky ones.
Edit:
> Git is a very powerful, flexible, reliable and efficient tool.
I didn't say it isn't any of those things. I said it's harder to use than competitors such as mercurial.