>What that sentence actually means is that the usability sucks and that if you spend enough time reading man pages you might actually get the software to do what you wanted it to do.

Yes. You have to - gasp - actually understand what the fuck you are doing to get things working correctly. I don't see the problem. As others have pointed out, git is not meant for the beginner, it's not meant for an average user, it's for people who want an extremely powerful VCS. If you start catering to people who are not from the latter group, you are missing both the point and the purpose of git.

>Personally, I don't think either UNIX or GIT made the trade off between usability and power, usability was simply ignored.

False. What you are talking about isn't usability. It's accessibility. And I actually agree with you that git is very inaccessible for someone who's never worked with a VCS before (that's how I started with git, thrown into cold water). The same goes for UNIX, to a degree. Now, usability and accessibility aren't necessarily orthogonal concepts. They aren't parallel, either, though. When you try to improve the accessibility of a program, you will arrive at a point where you will have to make tradeoffs with the usability of the program. And what I am saying is that when you reach that point, stop. Accessibility isn't worth sacrificing usability over.

>Actually it's one of the best things to do in software, you'll want to look at companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft who all dumb things down

Argumentum ad populum. Just because those companies do it doesn't imply that it's good. And in fact, they just prove my point: what they are doing is harming general purpose computing in the long run, and for everyone. Microsoft and Apple are aiming to turn computers into one-to-many consumption devices. Facebook and Google are privacy nightmares and impact the open web negatively with their monopolies.

>Imagine the UI for aircraft was so horrible that to get from NY to LA you needed an aerospace degree.

Your ridiculous hyperbole isn't making your point more valid. No, you shouldn't need to have an aerospace degree to fly from NY to LA. But you should have a grasp of how to get from NY to LA, not demand "I want to get to LA". The same goes for search engines. No, I don't expect people to understand the math behind page rank. But I expect them to be able to use a search machine. If that involves learning to make better search queries, then so be it.

Finally, if you want to use a powerful VCS like git, then I'm afraid you have to learn how git works. And not demand that it made be more accessible for people unwilling to learn how it's used. For people who want a simple (D)VCS with a much better accessibility (and consequently a lot less power), there's always bzr.

>PS. Mac has all the power of UNIX but with out a retarded interface meaning no tradeoff was actually necessary.

False. As others have pointed out, OS X is a horrible, crippled excuse for a UNIX, albeit with a shiny UI on top (whose usability is debatable and in my opinion horrible). I don't even know why developers put up with it. If you aren't specifically developing for OS X/iOS (same goes for Windows), there's literally no reason to not use GNU/Linux or one of the BSDs.