Wow! I love this analogy! Allow me to disagree with you inside the premise of your own analogy. Visiting a museum is a much more useful way to understand past world history, but visiting your grandma's attic is a much more useful way to understand the little twists and quirks of your own family. In much the same way, I think a curated history is very nice for open source projects with lots of committers and constant newcomers, while a history that preserves foibles can be more useful for smaller and tighter teams. It is often very enlightening to see the missteps that were taken on the road to the eventual solution to a problem.
