> weird configuration file
One of the disputes here is that the maintainers are of the opinion that config files are actually good, on the face of them. They point to examples of well-settled uses like .gitignore to claim that config files are The Git Way.
It may very well be that configuration files are in fact weird, or are weird in this particular case, but since the convention is and has been for git's history that config-files-are-good it would require a well-reasoned essay to move the needle of discourse on this subject, not just to use "they are weird" as a claim to prove something else.
> This 'True Rejection' is essentially rejecting the merit of refactoring code.
I don't want to get into a big meta-meta flamewar here, but there are many people who do reject the merits of refactoring working code, for some definitions of "refactor", for some definitions of "working", and this has been the subject of many popular essays, most notably Spolsky et al. This is another place where moving the needle of discourse would require writing a well-reasoned essay that quotes the appropriate authorities, and it is not sufficient just to appeal to a particular view of the merits of refactoring as a claim to prove something else.
> Hardlinks and symlinks are both features in their own rights.. [this] is a superficial change.
This is another one of those thorny semantic problems that are preventing us from understanding each other. There is a sense in which it is superficial, and another sense in which it is a substantial change. If you are using "git add", or are implementing it, it is a superficial change. If you are writing subtree-merge or git-submodule or something that really needs to understand the storage of submodules, it is substantial.
And so they are both features in their own right, in the sense that: git-add-and-friends will want to access things with a certain pattern, and git-submodule-and-friends will want to access things in a very different pattern. This is why I suspect the solution here is to have two distinct APIs, that access the same underlying storage mechanism. And if it makes sense to continue to support something very much like the old API, it probably does not make sense to redesign the FS to look like the new API.
Of course, there is a lot of resistance in the git community to have two ways to do the same thing. So when I say "I suspect the solution is to have two APIs" I mean only that it would address most of the objections raised thus far, not that it would actually be implemented in mainline.
> Everything the current submodules do could be achieved using the proposed solution. (As he repeatedly has to make clear to Linus and Junio)
And as Linus and Junio have repeatedly made clear, merely doing everything the current implementation does is not within a few galaxies of meeting the burden for breaking FS compatibility. The compatability-break burden is extremely high.
