On reflection, I suspect a lot of it is less the actual VCS itself, and more the way it gets exposed in the UI. In contrast to git (where I'm 100% command line), I spend most of my time with RTC using the GUI, which is reasonably well directed towards the most common needs.
I think I also have a lot of positive thoughts about RTC because I remember how easy it felt to get started with it. With git it took me a little while to internalise how it worked, and I screwed up my repositories beyond my newbish ability to recover a few times. When comparing each to SVN, RTC provided me the improvements I cared about most (easy sharing, interim 'commits' prior to pushing to mainline), with very little learning overhead.
Combine that with really excellent work item/defect integration and I think it's a pretty compelling product. As you say, the constant communication with the server is a definite bummer. I think that comes out of the more corporate focus of an IBM product - for a centralised team sitting in the same building as the campus, a bit of server communication isn't such a big deal.
I'd be pretty salty about having to use the VCS if it wasn't so well integrated with the work items. Definite improvement over GitHub in that regard. (I've still entertained the thought of writing some sort of git translation layer, but I don't know either well enough to translate some of the crazier edge cases.)
I think I also have a lot of positive thoughts about RTC because I remember how easy it felt to get started with it. With git it took me a little while to internalise how it worked, and I screwed up my repositories beyond my newbish ability to recover a few times. When comparing each to SVN, RTC provided me the improvements I cared about most (easy sharing, interim 'commits' prior to pushing to mainline), with very little learning overhead.
Combine that with really excellent work item/defect integration and I think it's a pretty compelling product. As you say, the constant communication with the server is a definite bummer. I think that comes out of the more corporate focus of an IBM product - for a centralised team sitting in the same building as the campus, a bit of server communication isn't such a big deal.