> Git really ought to be treated as a low level tool that is called by a higher level tool > Developers should just script their most common workflows and then use them 99% of the time.

FWIW, that is how git is organized: low-level "plumbing" commands for the content-addressable file system, and the high-level "porcelin" commands for a VCS. Moreover, most git commands have human and machine readable variants, to facilitate abstraction.