Well, then I'm sorry. Your issue seems not so much that tools have shortcomings, but rather, that you seem to focus on these shortcomings so much that everything looks like crap. Maybe not in general, but at least in relation to VCSes, it sure seems like you're wearing some brown-tinted glasses, so to speak.

As a point in case, it's certainly interesting to see you completely disregard jujutsu because it happens to also work (optionally!) with a proprietary backend, when its most useful feature is that it makes working with git night-and-day better, nothing proprietary required. This thing could be a ray of light for you, but for some curious reason, you seem to go out of your way to ignore it.

I mean, it's definitely possible that you think to this day that SVN was the bee's knees and its demise in favor of git or mercurial made us all poorer, but that's certainly a rare perspective. In that context, I'm also finding it hard to reconcile your initial statement around the calcification in VCS land, and now it sounds like you would have preferred to stick with SVN instead.

I'm sure you can give me a rationale for it all, but I wonder how much of it will be just picking rotten (or declared-rotten) cherries out of an otherwise tasty pile. If you stack up the present against a rosy-tinted version of the past and some inexistent pie-in-the-sky, it's no surprise it comes up wanting; but that's just a way to make yourself unhappy, really.