It seems that git is the new regex. People are actively building things around instead of learning the rules. I suppose that came from writing being easier than reading.
I know regular expressions way better than most people I come across and I still never feel to good about my command of the more 'esoteric' features.
Having a version control system ( something that more people will use more often every day than regexes ) compared to them, is not a heartening thought.
Underneath, git is actually based on a really simple tree-of-objects data structure. All those esoteric features are built on an elegant base; understand that base, and you can understand anything git does (though it may not be obvious at first).
I don't want to venture too far off-topic, but when the Perl 6 folks re-designed regexes, they found out that they weren't really designed for anything; the syntax just grew, and common features were sometimes longer than rare ones: http://www.perl6.org/archive/doc/design/apo/A05.html (section "Poor Huffman Coding").
I haven't studied enough of the Git plumbing to know what's going on underneath, but I suspect that the same thing is going on, where features are added without regard to other ones already present (feel free to correct me on this)
