> Coming from mercurial (which is older than git)

Git is older than mercurial by 12 days. Bazaar has git beat by about the same amount of time. The major DVCSes all came out within a month of each other.

> But Linus pushed git and people followed like sheep.

I don't think this is true. Until around 2010-2011 or so, projects moving to DVCS seemed to pick up not git but mercurial. The main impetus I think was not Linux choosing git but the collapse of alternate code hosting places other than GitHub, which essentially forced git.

the lack of a proper branch history is also the main pain point for me. but i disagree that noone wants a DCVS. having a full copy of the history locally, and being able to clone from any repo to anywhere else and even merge repos (without merging branches) is a major win for me.