> The point of rebasing for clarity, IMHO, is to take what might be a large, unorganized commit or commits (i.e. the result of a few hours good hacking) and turning it into a coherent story of how that feature is implemented.

Isn't this the same rationalization that drives Git Flow's feature branches and merging via --no-ff ? You can see the messy real work in the feature branch, but it gets merged to the main branch as one clean commit.