2,3,5: very valid and the reason why we use Mercurial instead. Can't afford to hire a Git guru in every team. Instead we use a tool that's easier for everyone.
Once you start adding more than one developer to a Mercurial repo you need to know how Mercurial works, so I don't see how this is much different. In fact adding remotes to Mercurial was a much harder process last time I used it.
The point is, Mercurial is much easier learn. We are a team of 20 developers distributed across globe that transitioned from SVN and it was easy for us to pick up Mercurial and start using it within a couple of days.
We tried git too and lost our changes inevitably. Our git knowledge is to be blamed but blame git CLI too! It is not easy to learn at all. After 12 years of git, I see articles with tips and guides on using git. That kind of hints how esoteric git CLI can be.
I feel like most of the trouble developers have with Git is pretty shallow, and it's a shame. It's not a tool I would want to get non-programmers to use (which may be a problem if you've got design folks on your team as well), but the model should be pretty learnable (in principle) to anyone who can manage to hobble their way through an intro data structures course.
For folks like me, who spent their evenings in high-school screwing around with obscure linux distros and have been scouring badly written man pages trying to fix their computer for half their life, the little stuff is forgivable, and a lot of the big stuff is pretty good. But it's a shame how many inessential hurdles there are. See also:
Biggest piece of advice for not losing data: learn about git-reflog and git-reset before doing anything that modifies history. Nothing is destroyed, even by "scary" operations like rebase, so it's always possible to recover something, but you need to know how to find stuff.
I do some contract work for a university, where we have lots of student interns going through. We use GitHub, and we rarely rebase or cherry-pick, basically because while I could spend a bunch of time trying to teach git to new interns that will be gone in 4 months, It seems like a more efficient use of time to just occasionally put up with a messy history.
