Speaking of user friendliness of git UI. I am working on a revision control system that (ideally) should be as user friendly as Ctrl+S Ctrl+Z in most common cases. Spent almost a week on design docs, looking for feedback (so far it was very valuable, btw)
https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html#navigating-the-hist...
Have you tried Jujutsu? If you want to make a better VCS, your baseline should be that, in my opinion, because it already deals with a lot of the Git pain points whilst be able to read and publish to Git repositories.