The git community seemed a little inaccessible at the time (though that might have just been because they were very smart and very busy). Documentation was couched in graph theory, and Windows support wasn't a priority.

The attitude seemed to be "git is a powerful command line tool for manipulating a graph-theory-based file system, which uses cryptographic hashes to identify nodes. Use it with care, as you don't want to do a hard reset on the index when you really wanted a semi-soft reset -- that could be bad".

Mercurial sold itself as a distributed version control system.

Github has done a lot to bring git into the mainstream (I'm switching on account of them), but it's taken a long time for git to become newbie friendly.

> I'd be interested to know what the "core developers" disliked about Git too.

I spoke to Brett Cannon --basically the guy who chose Mercurial-- not long after the choice was made. Apparently the most important factor was that Mercurial was the favorite choice in the Python community. That's probably because Mercurial is written in Python, and was used by a lot of Python projects.

Also Git didn't work very well under Windows at the time if I remember correctly.

> Also Git didn't work very well under Windows at the time if I remember correctly.

Yep, Windows wasn't well supported so it was a pain to setup, and it was very very slow.

> I'd be interested to know what the "core developers" disliked about Git too.

I seem to recall part of the attraction of Mercurial was that it's written in Python.

I find tortoisegit to be rather good for simple merges/commits on windows. For linux/macOS I just use the command line.